The Rating System is Overrated

Alright! So today I wanted to talk about something that's been really bothering me for a while: The rating system. It's stupid. 

The rating system is a cruel and fickle thing. I feel as if in the past years, the rating system... has been slipping, due to filmmakers only making "a" type of movie, and the rating system itself just being silly. 

The rating system, as defined here in the states, is the Motion Picture Association (Or the MPAA). It's a group of people that get together and decide a films' rating, and because of this, films have been forced into an archetype that doesn't create the best content.

But to first understand our situation, we must understand how we've gotten to this point. The first iteration of the system was known as the Hays Code, which lasted from 1922 to 1968. It had strict guidelines for what was morally correct and incorrect. Language was sparsely used, violence was off-screen, and the most sensual it got was a kiss. This is why even gruesome stories like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho are, by today's standards, very clean. Think about it. Psycho is a movie about, spoiler alert, a psycho who dresses his dead mother's skeleton, talks for it, and kills his tenants for it. 

Today I'm taking you down.

Yet for the actual content, the things shown on screen, it has nothing in it. It's PG, maybe scraping PG-13 at best. There's one shot of his mother's skeleton and that's it. All stabbings are off-screen, blood running down drains is just chocolate syrup, and there's no language in the film at all. There's nothing in here a child couldn't handle. And yes, what content children can handle varies from child to child, but objectively, there's nothing in here a 10-year-old (Or hardcore 8-year-old) couldn't handle (Other than the black and white format, a disliking of which is becoming disturbingly common among the youth).

Objectively, Psycho, often seen as one of the scariest and best films ever made, is barely PG.

The Hays system eventually fell out of fashion and, in 1968, the new president of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, created the rating system mostly as we know it. I'm muddling the timeline here, but we had G, for general audiences, PG, which recommended parental guidance, R, for restricted audiences, and NC-17 (Originally called X) - no one under 17 allowed. That category's basically legal porn.

PG-13 was thrown into the mix in 1984 after complaints from parents about the grisly nature of PG films like Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They had the problem of movies that couldn't be recommended to children, but also couldn't not be recommended to them. They're violent, but not enough to warrant an R. You had kid flicks that were G, and then you had very violent movies like RoboCop, or very profane movies like Breakfast Club, both of which were, ironically, marketed to children anyway. PG had too much variation in it. Parents could see E.T. the Extraterrestrial or Big - the latter of which has an f-word and a fairly lengthy scene in which the technically 12 years old main character gropes his love interests' breasts. 

PG-13 wasn't terribly widespread, with even major movies like Beetlejuice still being rated PG. This all changed in 1989. What happened in 1989? Tim Burton's Batman. This was the first big summer movie. Not the first blockbuster, that was Jaws, but the first big blockbuster as we know it - the PG-13, four-quadrant, heavily marketed, tie-in McDonald's Happy Meal blockbuster. It redefined the rating. After Batman, you started getting big PG-13 movies like Jurassic Park, Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump, Mission: Impossible, and Titanic.

However, as the years have gone on, the ratings have lost some of their "rigor." This is best exemplified by two movies: The Matrix and Frozen. These may seem like two drastically different choices, but they both illustrate the same thing: Over the years, the rating system has stopped being rated by their content inside of them are instead being rated by what the best "feel" for that genre is.

And it's not just that the rating system is stupid, it's also that filmmakers are being stupid as well. Don't worry, I'll explain.

Language

G-rated movies have absolutely no language in them at all. Nothing worse than "jerk." PG movies are allowed some language, like Incredibles II, and PG-13 is allowed quite a bit of language, but the rule of thumb is that they only get one F-bomb, but that's not always the standard. Movies like The Martian, Moneyball, and The Social Network all have multiple uses of the F-bomb.

Then you get to R-Rated. R-Rated can range from The King's Speech, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice - Ultimate Edition, and 1917's relatively chaste use of the F-word (1-14) to The Wolf of Wall Street's record-breaking 569 F-words. And, yes, I did use two outliers, but that just shows the drastic range that the R-Rating can include. Language is important because it can play such a big role in the film's rating, which then plays a big role in its overall success. Also, what film needs more than, like, 25 f-words to tell a story? And why is there such a limit on PG-13, but then such a wide range for R? 

Ironically enough, the director of The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorcese, derided Marvel movies for not being "cinema." Keep in mind that this is the guy that needed three hours of f-bombs and light porn starring Leonardo DiCaprio to create "real" cinema, but I digress.

Violence

PG-13 movies have, on average, become more violent since the 80s. I pinpoint this to the rise of fantasy flicks in the early 2000s - What I pinpoint as the Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man trilogy. Lord of the Rings is nearly 12 hours of nonstop stabbings, arrow shootings, large-scale battles where thousands of people die, and in extreme cases, falls from large spikes onto other large spikes, and launching catapults full of severed human heads. That sounds pretty R-Rated, but with one important difference: It's orcs. No one cares if an orc gets sliced or if a CGI creature gets tossed into lava and slowly burns to death. Or Spider-Man. Why should I care if a fictional evil scientist injects himself with "Crazy serum," dons a green suit, and then launches explosives that turn people into skeletons? It's obviously not real.

Because it's not even trying to be real, we take the violence in it for granted, and thus the cap is set on how much violence PG-13 can include: Practically all of it, save for blood. Blood is where the MPAA draws the line. In Marvel movies, people get stabbed, kick through walls, and punched repeatedly in the face with barely any reaction other than it being "just a flesh wound." It's gotten to the point where The Matrix, which came out in 1999, would be PG-13 by today's standards. No F-bombs and no nudity, just over-the-top violence against non-human opponents that don't have blood. One dude even gets shot point-blank in the head with no blood splatter.

Once Upon A Deadpool is concrete evidence of how our rating system is biased against blood and not violence. It's a PG-13 cut of the very much R-Rated Deadpool 2, but with one important difference: in the words of IMDb, it "throws out almost all the blood and gore, but leaves in all the action." Doing that (And censoring all the f-words) got it PG-13 in America. But over in Britain, the movie was still given the 15 Certificate (Their equivalent of an R-Rating). You may have cut out the bloody cherry, but you're still left with an ice cream sundae of violence. You're not saving any calories.

Box Office 

Looping back to The Matrix, it was stuck at a weird time. The first Matrix came out in 1999 when R-Rated movies were still pretty sizable, not yet surpassed by PG-13. And so The Matrix is, again, fairly light in terms of R-Rated content, with Captain America: The Winter Soldier having, in my eyes, the same level of intense violence and Minority Report having some of the "icky" aspects of the plot. So when LOTR and the Spider-Man movies came out, the Matrix movies became increasingly R-Rated (As evident by the orgy in The Matrix Reloaded and the extreme violence in The Matrix Revolutions).

When you go see an MCU movie, the entire theater is packed with little kids. Now I wasn't alive at the time, but I'm fairly certain that when the likes of Jurassic Park, Titanic, and Forrest Gump came out, the theater wasn't packed with Younglings. PG-13 is the new home for family content.

Nowadays it feels like movies are more so rated based off of what they "feel" like. This is best exemplified by animated movies. Back in the 1980s, PG wasn't used all that much for animated movies. Disney's first animated movie, The Black Cauldron, earned that rating by showing flesh being ripped off of skeletons. It also nearly bankrupted Disney animation because no one wanted to see a PG animated movie. Then you got Shrek in 2001. Shrek was an animated flick filled with crude humor, innuendoes, and some cleverly placed language - and it made $484 million (Comparable box office to the Disney Renaissance). 

After Shrek, nearly every major animated film has been rated PG. Only 7 big G-Rated films have come out in the 2010s, and most are Pixar flicks. G-Rated films were on their way out before, but after The Princess and The Frog disappointed, both the G-Rating and hand-drawn animation were tossed aside in favor of the CGI, PG Frozen and Tangled. 

Frozen is rated PG. Why though? It's not any more violent than Tarzan or The Little Mermaid, and contrary to what the rating says, it does not have "Mild rude humor." Mild rude humor is Shrek. Frozen had... nothing. And Tangled had a climactic stabbing that warranted parental guidance, but Beauty and the Beast's stabbing back in '91 was deemed appropriate for general audiences. 

The MPAA clearly just rates movies based off of their "feel" and not the actual content. Pixar's most recent release, Soul, was rated PG for "thematic elements and some language." Soul is about a man who dies and accidentally goes to The Great Before, where souls come from. While there, he asks if he's in hell (Which is then repeated by some younger souls). The word is said 15-ish times, with most of them inaudible due to the overlap. Now, that sounds like a lot, but it is referring to the place and not directed at anyone. But the weirdest thing about this is that Cars, the 2006 flick, had the line "I'm in hillbilly hell!" and a fair amount of brutal racing crashes (Including the near-destruction of a secondary character) and was rated G.

Now we loop back to Psycho. The MPAA went back and re-rated Psycho R for "Violence and sexuality/nudity." This is a movie made during the Hays Code, y'all. It had a shower murder and didn't show anything sensitive. There was a scene in the opening where the main character wears a bra, but that's as sexual as it gets. And the movie only has two deaths, and both don't show the actual killing, (Only chocolate syrup pouring down a drain). So why rate it R? Is it because the movie's actually R-Rated, or is it because it fits the "Feel?" (And yes, the re-rating did happen in 1984, but the point still stands. How is Psycho R-Rated at all?).

Or take They Shall Not Grow Old, a WWII documentary - but in color and 16:9. It's rated R, but most of the pictures of war shown are no worse than what you'd find in a 7th-grade PowerPoint presentation about WWII. But it's rated R.

And on the filmmaking side, we have Arrival. Arrival was a 2016 sci-fi movie about aliens invading Earth. But it's not aliens invading Earth, it's just aliens coming to Earth and our struggle to communicate with them. It's a pretty clean flick, with barely any sex or language, aside from one F-bomb. Arrival is rated PG-13 for "Brief strong language," and it's pretty obvious why they slipped that in there: Without it, Arrival is a slow, thought-provoking, emotional 2 hour-long drama about aliens. No one wants a PG drama movie. PG is for My Little Pony: The Movie!

And it worked! Arrival made $200 million at the box office! That's really good for an original movie! And it was nominated for Best Picture (Although Amy Adams was snubbed for Best Actress). Fun fact: The last PG movie to win Best Picture was Driving Miss Daisy in 1989. Most drama movies are R-Rated dramas and sweep Academy Awards faster than Cinderella in a barbershop (I'll think of a better metaphor later, okay?). 

And when was the last time a big PG live-action blockbuster didn't lose money? The most recent thing I could think of was Tron: Legacy in 2010.

For an example you've probably heard of, did you know that Star Wars (A New Hope) was originally rated G? According to the film's publicity manager, a few of the board members fell asleep while watching it and just gave it a G! And Star Wars had a bloody severed arm and the line "Your father and his damned idealistic crusade." They resubmitted the film with no changes and the MPAA re-rated it PG. 

Or take Disney's new Star Wars Sequel Trilogy. Why are any of them rated PG-13? None of them came close to Anakin slaughtering younglings. No one's limbs were lost (In fact, the lightsabers were fairly ineffective against humans). And none of them had anything remotely close to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru's charred corpses. The most they did was have positive depictions of a cult and showed working environments for stormtroopers that would make OSHA weep.

My man here took a lightsaber to the face and took no damage.

R =/= Automatic Great

One of the most annoying things I've ever seen is a demand that a movie "should" be rated R because that's the only way to tell a mature story. The biggest offender here is Matt Reeves' The Batman. As soon as the trailer came out and featured Battinson brutally beating down a thug, fans were demanding that it be rated R, as if that was the only way to tell a dark and violent story. The fact is, Batman's worked really well in PG-13 and TV-PG form. Added blood and the occasional f-bomb from a crook wouldn't make the movie any better, just restrict younger Batman fans from seeing it. And no matter how dark the movie is, it'll probably never come close to the PG Mask of the Phantasm's "I didn't count on being happy" or Justice League Unlimited's death of Ace. 

And an R-Rating's not happening anyways. We've gotten everything but confirmation LEGO is making sets for that movie, and WB will need a cash cow after the losses of 2020 and the HBO Max gimmick.

Take Zack Snyder saying that his upcoming Justice League "Is insane and so epic and is probably rated R." I absolutely hate this because it implies that because it is so epic, it must be R-Rated, despite the plentitude of films that aren't R-Rated and still epic, like, offhand, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, Titanic, and Lord of the Rings. (It should be noted here that The Snyder Cut's not going to be Logan levels of violence, and probably more akin to the Ultimate Edition of Batman v. Superman. Just an f-bomb and a few blood spurts, nothing terribly obscene other than the runtime).

For whatever reason, the majority of what is seen as pristine television or Academy Award-level movies are R-Rated or TV-MA, despite most of the TV-MA shows having unnecessary and gratuitous sex and violence to draw in viewers, copying the Game of Thrones model. Why do the Emmys not recognize animated TV shows like Avatar?

And this culture can lead to PG-13 efforts at drama being lambasted for their rating, like Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan actually had to explain the film's PG-13 rating because everyone was expecting that the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Dunkirk ended up being called one of the greatest war films of all time, and never skipped out on the terror of war. It just did it without showing, you know, D-Day. 

It's like we're expecting no limitations to produce better content, because actually seeing someone having their face cut off in Birds of Prey left much more of a mark than Joker's pencil trick did in The Dark Knight. Even with cable TV's restrictions, you still had great shows like Breaking Bad. You didn't need the brutal violence of a Netflix show like Daredevil or Punisher to tell a good story. 

You know, like the classic horror movie advice: Seeing the monster at all times is much scarier than never seeing the monster. 

And I just want it to be said that some of the best content out there is animated and made for children. Just look at the Married Life scene of Up, the ending of WALL-E, the aforementioned DCAU scenes (As well as this one), and Avatar: The Last Airbender. They're all top-notch quality, and in 99 out of 100 cases, will be better than the unnecessarily graphic content of TV-MA and R. 

And don't even get me started on the Oscar bias. Besides ignoring animated movies for Best Picture, they also heavily favor R-Rated dramas over all other categories. 60% of the nominations in the past 30 years have been R-Rated (112 films) and only 7% of them have been PG or G - 15. And there have been no PG or G-Rated Best Picture winners since 1989.

Look at this graph.

How can we fix it? 

The way I see it, R-Ratings are like PG was in the 1980s. There's such a wide variation in what the movie can include. How can a movie like The King's Speech, featuring 35 seconds worth of F-bombs, be counted in the same category as a movie like Saw, which literally invented a new genre known as "Torture Porn."

Like a physics equation, let's assume that we don't calculate friction even though it would obviously exists. In a perfect world, movies would have optimal box office performance regardless of ratings, so Arrival could be PG and still be seen with the same value as a PG-13 sci-fi drama flick. 

There's one of two ways to end this: Either filmmakers need to get it into their heads that restrictions can lead to just as good (If not better) content than having no restrictions, or the MPAA actually starts rating movies based on their content and not their "feel." One of them needs to budge first, and the other should follow in place. And it definitely wouldn't hurt for Awards shows to look at things other than R-Rated historical dramas.

Or maybe we split the R-Rating into two categories, R and E. R would constitute movies like 1917, The King's Speech, and 12 Years A Slave, where the language and violence fits thematically. It's not over the top, it's just realistic and makes the movie more accurate. I wouldn't expect an adaptation of 12 Years A Slave (A great read by the way) to be PG-13.

E would stand for Excess. This category is for movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, Deadpool, Kingsman, and anything directed by Quentin Tarantino. It's excessive because that's what their target audience wants. Excess. 66 uses of the f-word in Baby Driver doesn't make the movie better, it just makes it sound like two middle schoolers approved the script (I still love you Edgar Wright). 

There needs to be a difference, a line, on what counts as artistic and what counts as excessive.

And with all this in mind, I'm giving the rating system an S. For Stupid.

Pro-tip: Don't look at the rating of a movie, look at the IMDb Parent's Guide and then make the decision if you want to watch it. They're much more thorough.

Let's all take a page out of Avatar's book and just create quality content that can be enjoyed because it's good.