Today’s news, courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter:

As film backstories go, this one is fairly serpentine. This month, New Line Cinema’s “Snakes on a Plane,” which wrapped principal photography in September in Vancouver, went back before the cameras for five days of additional shooting at the Lot in Los Angeles. In this case, it wasn’t the usual reshoot, hastily assembled to fix a nagging story problem. Instead, the studio decided to create new scenes that would take the movie from PG-13 into R-rated territory. The second round of filming also came about because of intense and growing fan interest in the movie, which was directed by David R. Ellis and is not scheduled to be released until Aug. 18.

The first part is good news. Snakes on a Plane needs to be rated R. Why? Because there’s motherfucking snakes on the goddamn plane, that’s why!

The second part of the article is troubling, however. August 18 is a long, long ways away—too long for me to keep my excitement up about a movie, even if that movie will surely be The. Movie. Of. The. Year. Thankfully, Jeffrey Wells from the site Hollywood Elsewhere reports:

My New Line source says “there’s a heavy debate about this going on right now. Some want to stay with August because that gives you a couple of weeks free and clear…the competition isn’t too bad then. But others want to go sooner, for obvious reasons.”

Wells also points to the glory that is this.