''V for Vendetta'' gets a little too real

Moviegoers could experience uncomfortable flashbacks to London’s July 7 transit attacks when V for Vendetta is released this fall. Starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving and due out Nov. 4, Vendetta is based on Alan Moore’s comic book about a masked renegade who combats a totalitarian regime in a futuristic London with bombings and other terrorist tactics. It includes several instances that may recall the recent horrors in the U.K. One scene finds a subway train loaded with explosives; it was shot with government approval in an abandoned Underground station just before production wrapped in June. But some in the capital say they’re not concerned about the similarities. ”Movies are an art form — they’re fiction, they’re not real,” Ngaio Bowthorpe, a spokesperson for Film London, the city’s movie agency, told EW after the bombings, adding that all London film production has remained on schedule. ”Londoners are very resilient people and the movie industry is very resilient.”

Now the question is, how fine a line will Warner Bros. have to walk when promoting what’s become an accidentally incendiary movie? A spokesperson for the studio (a division of EW parent Time Warner) says plans for marketing the film are still not set. Whatever course producers follow, current events have made V for Vendetta more relevant than expected. ”[Terrorism] is one of those themes that never really goes away,” director James McTeigue told EW in April on the set. ”It’s always bubbling there under the surface, and I think every now and then you need a film to go, ‘Hey, let’s take a look at the situation that we’re in.”’