Punish me once – shame on me. Punish me twice…

Screenwriter Kurt Sutter made news over the weekend by announcing Thursday that he was removing his name from credit arbitration for the upcoming Punisher War Zone film.

I didn’t want credit. My pitch, my vision, for the Punisher franchise was something much different. I tried to rip Frank Castle from the comic book world and place him in the real streets of NYC. Castle is the only superhero without powers. He’s a tortured, highly skilled soldier with a really bad anger problem. I always felt we should see Frank in some place uber-real and gritty…

To me, the Punisher deserved more than the usual comic book redress. It shouldn’t just follow the feature superhero formula. Apparently, I was the only one who shared that vision…

The final script, rewritten almost completely by Holloway and Marcum was the perfect comic book formula — simple story, very obvious dialog and the inclusion of as many characters from the anthology that a movie will allow…

After apparently taking some heat for his initial post, Sutter responded Friday with some clarifications.

…Let me say, also for the record, the Punisher: Warzone script is not a bad script, in fact, I think it’s a very tight script. My beef, my frustration, was not about the script being good or bad, it was about creative choices. The comic book formula I referenced makes for fantastic movies. The last Batman, the Spiderman franchise, these were all fun, well-written movies. I had hoped The Punisher could be something more unique…

Well over the weekend, Sutter got hit with a lot of response – “five years worth of readers between lunch and dinner” by his regular-traffic calculations, and so today made it a little better and a little worse.

I’ve got no problem rattling a cage with the truth, but I don’t want to ever be accused of maligning someone with lies and half-facts.

I just want this movie to come out, do well… and go away. We’ve all been punished enough.

I just fear that, in some room at Marvel Films headquarters, some goon says “Hey, the dumbed-down formula worked for Ghost Rider — it can work for Punisher War Zone too!”