Sony Pictures has been backed into a corner again thanks to last fall’s email leaks and has been forced to defend the Will Smith-starring Concussion. It was reported that leaked emails showed how Sony changed the film to please the NFL, but the studio has called the report “misleading.”

Just days after the first trailer for the film was released, The New York Times claimed that the emails - specifically one written by Dwight Caines, Sony’s president of domestic marketing - showed how Sony tried to make sure the NFL would not be offended by writer/director Peter Landesman’s film. The movie stars Smith as Dr. Bennet Omalu, who linked the degenerative brain disease CTE with constant blows to the head. Based on the trailer, the film shows how Omalu tried to stop the NFL from burying his discoveries.

Sony sent a statement to the Associated Press, insisting that the Times’ story was “misleading” and made without seeing the final film, which opens on Christmas Day. “As will become immediately clear to anyone actually seeing the movie, nothing with regard to this important story has been 'softened' to placate anyone,” the studio said.

“'We always intended to make an entertaining, hard-hitting film about Dr. Omalu's David-and-Goliath story, which played out like a Hollywood thriller,” Landesman told the AP. “Anyone who sees the movie will know that it never once compromises the integrity and the power of the real story.”

Landesman also revealed one of the specific scenes that was cut out of the script due to concerns from Sony in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He told the site that the scene was cut because he “didn't want to be defamatory.”

The scene is a conversation between NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (played by Luke Wilson in the movie), Steelers team neurosurgeon Dr. Joe Maroon (Arliss Howard) and former NFL brain-injury research committee chairman Dr. Elliot Pellman (Paul Reiser) after player Dave Duerson’s suicide in 2011.

After Maroon tells Goodell that Deurson wanted to give his brain to research to find symptoms of CTE, Goodell says, “Good God. Was he symptomatic?”

“I thought he was just an asshole,” Maroon says. “For the brain’s last act to not just die, but preserve itself in the act of killing, humans don’t do that. We can’t explain it.” Maroon then adds, “This is going to unravel,” before the scene ends.

screenshot from 'Concussion' trailer