Jim Carrey is having a case of actor’s remorse.

Over the weekend, the 51-year-old star tweeted that he’s no longer comfortable with the level of violence in his upcoming movie Kick Ass 2, which hits theaters August 16.

I did Kickass a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to e

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

I meant to say my apologies to others involve with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) June 23, 2013

He’s referring to December’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in which twenty children and six adult staff members were fatally shot.

Mark Millar, an executive producer of both Kick Ass movies, responded on his blog:

“[I'm] baffled by this sudden announcement as nothing seen in this picture wasn’t in the screenplay eighteen months ago. Yes, the body-count is very high, but a movie called Kick-Ass 2 really has to do what it says on the tin. A sequel to the picture that gave us HIT-GIRL was always going to have some blood on the floor and this should have been no shock to a guy who enjoyed the first movie so much… This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorcese [sic] and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-Wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless body-count of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence… Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can’t be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action-movie.”

I featured Kick Ass 2 as one of our 7 Best Summer Movies For Women because of Chloe Moretz , but Jim’s announcement does give me pause. I felt the first film was a bit too gleeful about its violence; do these films really focus on the consequences, as Mark suggests?

At least Kick-Ass 2 is rated R. PG-13 films like Man of Steel and World War Z may be low on blood, but they feature plenty of violence that will be seen by kids. Earlier this year, President Obama pushed Congress to fund more research on the effects of violence in entertainment, since studies have drawn a variety of conclusions.

Most movie fans balk at the idea of reducing violence — but maybe it’s the ratings and not the films that should be reassessed. Something seems off when a romance like Before Midnight gets the same R rating as The Purge because Julie Delpy is topless in one scene.

“It’s amazing,” says Ethan Hawke, who stars in both films. “It’s almost like something out of The Purge that Before Midnight would be rated R because of a breast. It’s fascinating to me. I go see PG-13 movies with my son that have a death count in the thousands but you can’t show a breast? I never know how they come up with the ratings.”

“Our country’s relationship with sex and violence is a fascinating conundrum to me – both puritanical on one level and libertarian on the next,” he continued. “It’s funny because when we did interviews for Before Midnight, it was only the American press that was so concerned with Julie’s breasts. We’re like little abused children who never saw a titty. But yet, this movie is absolutely terrifying. It’s the truth about what we prioritize. I don’t even know what to say about it. Sex is a lot scarier to us than violence. We could write essays about it.”