First of all, Happy Saturday afternoon, dear reader. I hope you’re doing well. But I have some bad news: Universal Pictures has opted to scrap their release of The Hunt for *reasons.* The official ones are detailed below thanks to a carefully crafted press release from the studio’s powers that be. I’ll give them a +1 to Courage for cheekily re-describing the movie where elites hunt humans as a “satirical social thriller” but the rest of the motivation behind this move is straight-up spineless.

In the wake of just the latest mass shooting here in America (which is not to belittle the senseless loss of lives but to state, in fact, that this will happen again and soon), Universal pushed pause on their marketing campaign for director Craig Zobel‘s contemporary take on a similar idea to that seen in The Most Dangerous Game. Said idea, which sees elite hunters hunt down hapless human prisoners for funzies, was cooked up by The Leftovers‘ Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, who also produces alongside Jason Blum. Actual shootings by a racially motivated assailant weren’t enough to push the studio to cancel the movie outright, but the official cancellation came rather quickly after President Trump‘s recent Tweet-storm. While his vaguely coherent thumbed-together sentences don’t call out The Hunt by name, the movie was explicitly targeted by Fox News just hours before POTUS’ latest rant. Universal’s totally coincidental cancellation followed soon after.

Here’s the studio’s full statement: