There’s been a lot of stuff on my Twitter feed about the new Blade film being rated R. I recently reviewed the Blade Trilogy over the weekend, which was R-rated. There are some places out there that are announcing that the new film will be rated R. Screenrant says that the director of the new film, Yann Demange says that the movie will be the second MCU movie to have an R-rating, with the other one being Deadpool 3. Here’s the problem: It wasn’t announced by Marvel or Disney, and this isn’t showing in any of the major trades like Deadline or Variety, at least not yet. The reaction across twitter has been, “Hell yeah, the movie’s going to be rated R! It’s going to suck if isn’t!” Hold your horses, ladies and gents. Let me throw some cold water on that: The rating of a movie does NOT determine its quality. If the film’s rating was all that it took to be successful, then Expendables 4 should’ve been a box-office knock-out. It wasn’t. It was advertised as an R-rated movie because the third film was PG-13. I can tell you that Expendables 4 was NOT a good movie, and it didn’t do well at the box office. In fact, the movie ended its box-office run at 16 million dollars on a hundred million dollar budget. That’s a catastrophic failure of a movie that pretty much ensured the end of that franchise. The point is, is that whether a film is rated PG or R, it doesn’t guarantee a film’s success. A film’s success is determined by how many people bought tickets to go see it, and the only way that can happen is if people are interested in it. Also, word-of-mouth and reviews and all that jazz has an effect.
Don’t get me wrong: A lot of my favorite movies are R-rated films. There’s a certain degree of freedom that you have with an R-rating, but it’s important to understand that the writing of a film and it’s story is what determines the film’s rating. What is the intent of the film? What audience is the movie for? Historically speaking, R-rated have always done worse than PG-13 or PG movies, because those movies command a wider audience. You don’t necessarily have to worry about your child seeing somebody get dis-emboweled, decapitated or an other horrific methods of death and destruction. If all you have in your R-rated film is titties, f-bombs, and gore, it’s not going to be successful, at least not with your average film-goer. There has to be context and subtext behind such things. There needs to be a reason for it. I’m all for a good splatter-fest, but gore for the sake of gore is boring. There needs to be more than stomach-churning violence to be compelling. Look at this summer’s Oppenheimer. It’s an incredibly successful R-rated movie, but it didn’t rely on cheap tactics like gore and over-the-top violence. It was rated R because of the story of the man who created the atomic bomb. That’s inherently NOT a family-friendly story, yet it was incredibly successful. Now that had a lot to do with people not able to get tickets for Barbie, but regardless, it was a smash hit.
Now, certain genres do lend themselves better to an R-rating than others. Horror movies in particular tend to be R-rated. But not all of them. Some of the best horror movies are PG to PG-13. Ghostbusters, Poltergeist, Tremors. These movies didn’t need to be rated R to be amazing. You also need to understand that the bar for what constitutes a certain rating has changed over the past 40 years. There have been PG-13 movies released in the past 20 years that have pushed that rating to its absolute limits like The Dark Knight. Not kidding. If you’re going to the movies these days, don’t really worry about the rating unless the movie was made for it. MPA’s rating system is all over the place. The standards for what makes a certain rating changes like the weather. My final point is this: Don’t get excited for a movie because it’s rated R. Get excited for a movie for the experience you might get from it. If the film happens to be rated R, then that’s just icing on the cake, but it shouldn’t be determining factor for seeing a movie. That kind of mentality is really narrow-minded. Open yourselves up to all kinds of movies regardless of the rating.