I thought that when Sausage Party was released for its theatrical run, it was unrated. But when the DVD/Bluray came out, it was rated R. I just checked IMDB and they list the movie’s rating as R.
Am I just imagining that there was an unrated version of this? Was it an R-rated movie when it was first released?
Generally speaking, unrated films don’t show up in theaters. MPAA is a voluntary thing, but many balk at releasing above an R. When it comes to DVD/stream time, they often release unrelated versions as a gimmick (though that doesn’t mean that it’s not an improvement). A decade ago or so there were often rated and unrated DVDs coming out together, or the unrated comes later to make you buy 2 copies.
So the typical release is R in theaters, unrated and possibly R in home release. I’m not sure what incentive they’d have to make a more censored version for home viewers.
The MPAA system is very arbitrary. so an R is not necessarily cleaner than NR.
Maybe you saw a commercial that said “this movie has not been rated for release”?
Or “This movie has not yet been rated.” Happens when they are still dealing with the MPAA to get the desired rating.
During the promotion of the movie, Seth Rogen remarked how surprised he was at the stuff they got away and still got an R rating. They had to remove some “pubic hair” from the Middle Eastern lavash character, but still allowed (IIRC) a fellatio-esque scene during the food orgy. The usual trick is to put in more outrageous scenes you know will be cut by the “censors” so you can keep in the things you wanted, but they ended up letting them slide.
Fight Club:
“The original “pillow talk”-scene had Marla saying “I want to have your abortion”. When this was objected to by Fox 2000 Pictures President of Production Laura Ziskin, David Fincher said he would change it on the proviso that the new line couldn’t be cut. Ziskin agreed and Fincher wrote the replacement line, “I haven’t been fucked like that since grade school”. When Ziskin saw the new line, she was even more outraged and asked for the original line to be put back, but, as per their deal, Fincher refused.”
Sheesh, who agrees to an open-ended deal like that? If you know that the writer can come up with objectionable lines, why would you think the new one would be any less objectionable?
The story I heard was that they wrote the second line intentionally to be more offensive than the original line in hopes that the studio would relent and let them keep their less offensive first line. Fincher was surprised when the studio decided that the grade school line was more acceptable than the abortion line.
It was R rated when I saw it.
I remember because It was surprising to see children in the theater.
I don’t know, but censored heavy metal and gangster rap CDs used to be depressingly common at Walmart. You had to read the label very carefully to make sure you weren’t buying the bleeped version.
So I’d imagine there’s a market for censored movies, too, though I haven’t seen them. Like you said, it’s usually the opposite, with the unrated version being released on DVD.
This, exactly. Most theaters are owned by big chains (AMC, Cinemark, Marcus, etc.), and they generally have a policy of not running any unrated film. Not only that, but many chains won’t even consider running a film with an NC-17 rating, meaning that R is the “hardest” rating that you’ll see in general release, and that when a film that’s intended for theatrical release does get an NC-17 rating, the filmmaker / studio will probably recut it in order to bring it down to an R.
Smaller / independent theaters, particularly those which run foreign / art films, may run unrated movies, but “Sausage Party” was pretty much the polar opposite of an art film. 
It was a good trade - the grade-school line is a lot funnier.