Via Forbes.com:
Last week, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice shocked absolutely no one by snagging a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. Tim Burton’s Batman of course basically made the PG-13 a mainstream rating way back in 1989, just four years after its initial creation. And over the last 26 years, the rating has slowly become the “for all purposes” designation for pretty much any film that isn’t an animated feature or an unapologetic adult-skewing movie. I am amused at how we’re all acting shocked at the “some sensuality” labeling for said superhero movie, but that’s a different conversation if time allows. So we knew Batman v Superman was getting a PG-13 just as we knew Spectre and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part II were getting the same classification. But what of the other 800lb gorilla in the marketplace?
Will Star Wars: The Force Awakens do what is expected of it and get a PG-13 for something like “ intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action throughout?” Or will it stay within the bounds of (most of) its prior installments and go out with a PG rating? A year ago, I would have told you that the chances of the film forsaking the PG-13 were pretty slim. But that’s before we had an October with four live-action PG movies. We’ll see to what extent the PG ratings help or Robert Zemeckis’s The Walk, Warner Bros./Time Warner TWX +0.55% Inc.’s Pan, Sony kid-friendly horror romp Goosebumps, and Universal/Comcast CMCSA +1.69% Corp.’s Jem and the Holograms by month’s end. Having now seen three out of four of those films (and I’ll assume Jem and the Holograms won’t push any boundaries with its “thematic material including reckless behavior, brief suggestive content and some language”), it’s nice to see that, if only by circumstance, the live action PG is alive and well.
Obviously all four movies may well fall or fly for reasons wholly unrelated to the MPAA classification, especially in the case of The Walk which is arguably targeting adults. In this day-and-age, the PG-13 has become so common that it basically is a stand-in for a PG, with young kids flocking to the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. We now see films like The Martian or Ant-Man that absolutely could have gone out as PG if the desire existed (those Matt Damon “f-bombs” are really the only thing keeping The Martian in the PG-13 zone) as well as films like White House Down or No Good Deed that are R-rated movies in every way except judicious editing choices and a lack of outright explicit content. So it’s really great to see films that are not only PG-rated but actually feel like they darn well deserve that PG and it’s not just “eeek, thematic elements!” keeping them from a G.
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