Despite early footage that gave every indication that the upcoming Terminator Salvation would be a dark, brutal action movie set in a bleak, postapocalyptic future and featuring graphically violent human deaths at the hands of terrifying robots, could Warner Bros. be pressuring director McG to deliver a PG-13 rating? Maybe! Though McG already debunked a similar rumor last year, at WonderCon in San Francisco yesterday he said he's been asked by the studio to make cuts to the film. The objectionable content in question? Toplessness.

Given Terminator's cast, one might naturally assume that the offending material would be profanity or violence, but if the studio did ask McG to tone down either of those things, that's not what he's most upset about. Apparently WB is trying to get him to remove a scene in which actress Moon Bloodgood appears without a shirt. "Do you want to see Moon's boobs in the picture?" he reportedly asked an all-male crowd yesterday (you can imagine the response) while actually seated next to the poor actress.

The director claims the nudity isn't gratuitous and that it's actually, somehow, an homage to Linda Hamilton's toplessness in the original 1984 Terminator. But if taking a short nude scene out of a movie this bleak and violent-seeming is sufficient to get it a more profitable PG-13, it's enough to make one wonder: How the hell did Slumdog Millionaire get an R rating, again?

Terminator Salvation: Warner Bros Wants PG-13 Edits, McG is Fighting For His R-Rated Vision [/Film]
Terminator Salvation Uses Bad-Ass Robots to Explore Humanity [Underwire/Wired]