There was a lot of media buzz over the fact that Deadpool and Logan were rated R. I didn’t exactly pay close attention, because I’m sick of all these superhero movies and have stopped watching them, but I remember the articles I did glance at generally implying not only that it was a Big Deal for these movies to be rated R, but that it was a Good Thing.
What was this about? Why do entertainment journalists seem to think it’s Important for these movies to be rated R? My WAG is that such people tend to be cultural-subversive types, and they think comic books are viewed as being “for kids,” and they’re eager to see that idea subverted, with new comic book movies being “edgy” because they’re filled with sex, drugs, graphic gore, profanity, etc. Is that it?
I personally appreciate that what is typically a violent genre is not going to (excessively) sanitize that violence, and that characters (despite their often colorful costumes and personalities) are not going to limit their speech like adults afraid that children might be listening.
They might just be trying to sell extra tickets. Children under 17 can’t get into an R rated movie unless accompanied by an adult, although they do get past that all of the time. Make Mom or Dad take the kids and you’ve sold an extra admission.
That’s not how it works. R-rated movies do not sell more tickets, generally, precisely because parents are not interested in taking their families to see them.
The reason it’s significant that some comic book movies are being released with R ratings is because it is traditionally a genre that has relied on its broad marketing to families (and PG-13 ratings) in order to recoup their extremely high production costs. Releasing an expensive movie at R is risky, especially because it’s a genre that typically appeals to young teenagers.
You guys are awfully ornery tonight. I didn’t say you had to care whether I cared. I’m asking why the entertainment media seems to care so much. Posts like friedo’s address that.
I think I’m with you, in that whatever an R provides is not anything I want in my movies, but:
…I think Bryan Ekers is expressing a very common desire amongst adult superhero movie fans. They don’t want implied violence soft-balled anymore, they want it to be portrayed a lot more realistically.
It’s an attitude I don’t share, and therefore find difficult to understand, but I have had to accept that most entertainment is not made with me in mind anymore, I am largely an anomaly amongst my peers.
No, you’re not. Everyone dismisses (or has never even heard of) 90+% of the entertainment options available to us. Even at whatever phase of your life when you were (for lack of a better word) at your “hippest”, there were huge swaths of entertainment that you were ignoring, even if it was aimed at your particular peer group.
Deadpool and Wolverine are characters that have historically tended to push comic book boundaries.
Both are on the high end of the violence scale, and their particular abilities and the weapons they tend to use should logically lead to considerably bloodier fights than most characters. They have “bad” powers, as Sydney explains them, both in terms of getting injured themselves and in being lethal enough that writers and artists often had to be careful which enemies they paired them off with.
Powers aside, Deadpool is rude and insane, and his actual condition kind of makes for nightmare fuel if you think about it, though his wackiness tends to distract from it. Wolverine’s themes tend to be pretty grim as well, and they get played straight. Basically, these are guys you’d expect to be very dark and crude if they weren’t cleaned up for the medium they normally appear in.
So, I imagine some of the favorable response to the R rating was a reaction to the idea of these characters finally being presented without being sanitized, so to speak.
Short answer: Movies have been pitched at a younger, less sophisticated audience than comic books ever since the 1980s or so, certainly since the 1990s. It’s only now that movies are catching up.
By “movies” I mean mass-market movies, not arthouse stuff or Oscar-genre pieces or similar, works meant to appeal to a mass audience as opposed to critics and/or Members of the Academy (thanks be upon them); in short, the works which best reflect what movie studios think the mass market actually wants. These days, that’s Logan, a film with moral complexity and violence used to tell a story about round characters. That’s why it represents an end-point, of sorts, for the evolution of movies: Now, they can be on a level with comic books, not sanitized versions of them, because movie studios regard movie audiences as being ready for complex films, with heroes who aren’t Dirty Harry or similar cardboard cut-outs.
As said above, the R rating is not a goal in itself. It is just that Deadpool showed that a R rated comic book movie can make (a lot of) money. If a character or storyline would work better in a more “mature” approach that leads to a R rating, there is now evidence that this can work financially.
I saw one of the Kevin Smith podcasts after Deadpool’s first weekend and they were stressing this point. It is not that all comic book movies need to go for R, or even many (Guardians of the Galaxy and Spiderman movier will definitely stay PG13), but it opens up a whole lot of possibilities in characters, story lines, etc. that were considered “undoable” before. Undoable because they wouldn’t work well in a “sanitized” version and the perception was that only PG13 comic book movies get financed.
It is not difficult to understand why fans of the genre are happy about these new possibilities.
The flip side of that is that in some other countries, here in the UK for example, you can’t watch an 18 rated film in a cinema under that age with or without a parent. Sure some 16-17 year olds will sneak in, but they’re cutting out a lot of the potential audience.
Oops, got the rating translation wrong, but I think my point still stands; sure, in the US you’ll gain a few parents along with the under 17 year olds, but then you’ll lose some kids as a cinema audience in other countries.
It’s probably pretty complicated to work out the optimum, given that every country will categorise films differently, then impose different age limits and rules on allowing accompanied kids under that age or not, and of course, the overseas market may not really be significant anyway for some films. Looking at the box office takings, Deadpool took more money outside the US than inside it though.
Exactly and yay! Same with comic books themselves: some soft-pedal the violence, and some show beating hearts being torn right out of people’s chests. You get to choose.
As a general rule, diversity is good for everyone. It increases the chance of you, as an individual, finding a product you really like.
Working against that, alas, is the mega-hit effect, where something succeeds and makes millions, at which point you see lots and lots of copy-cat work. This is dismaying when one happens not to be particularly fond of that product.
(I haven’t seen the movie, but I detest Deadpool as a character: he’s a bully and a coward. He kills people who are VASTLY less powerful than he is.)