Rated R, For "Rawwwr"

These days if you want your comic book movie to succeed you need to aim for a joined demographic, movies like "The Avengers" offer mature material for adults and exciting action for kids. Usually a "family friendly" comic book movie has the highest potential. But some characters don't fit the "family friendly" audience, and creators of these movies should take notice of that.

It was recently announced that the upcoming "Deadpool" movie will have an R rating and won't be the kind of movie to take children to see. Vulgarity, violence, pure immaturity with a side gore, just as a Deadpool movie should be. Many fans of the character were initially worried 20th Century Fox would stamp a PG-13 rating on the film and dumb down the things that make the character so iconic. As far as mainstream comic book movies go, not many studios want a mature movie to taint their squeaky-clean shared universe, that's why all of Marvel Studios more mature material will be screened over Netflix, a service only adults could have. Movies like "Watchmen", "Kick-Ass" and "Dredd" have pushed the R rating, but have gotten away with it because they are not directly connected to any film franchise. The only mainstream Marvel movies to have an R rating were the three "Blade" movies, but they were made long before the MCU we have now.

As mentioned, some characters deserve to have an R rating, characters like Wolverine and The Punisher. These are characters who not only openly kill, but characters who are realistically scary. This argument carries over to the video game industry as well, with "Batman: Arkham Knight" receiving an M rating. While uncommon, this kind of rating over a comic book video game doesn't go unwarranted because while Batman himself isn't violent to the point of murder, he will still beat criminals close to death, criminals who are murderous psychopaths, mind you. The reason why people gush over Heath Ledger's Joker more than Jim Carrey's Riddler is because the rating for "The Dark Knight" allowed The Joker to come off as terrifying, if that movie were rated R I imagine the praise would have only skyrocketed. Meanwhile, "Batman Forever" was stuck in a phase when comic book movies were just for kids and needed to appease a younger audience, The Riddler could be creepy, but he couldn't be realistically psychopathic. Now if the next Superman movie were to be rated R I'd be a bit more concerned, but the rating of a comic book movie will always depend on the character in question. Movie studios shouldn't take a character who is popular to adults and try to censor it for kids as it does a disservice to the older fans and only gives young viewers a botched representation of the source material.

This opinion stands for other pop culture material, too. Should Godzilla be rated R? Yes, because Godzilla's earliest interpretations presented him as a disaster. Should Power Rangers be rated R? No, because to this day the Power Rangers franchise has been targeted towards kids. It's as simple as history paints it to be. To older nerds credit, the kind of superhero movies you had back in the day had a very different rating system. The first "Robocop" movie was extremely inappropriate, but back then the public wasn't as concerned about what their kids see as they are today. So, in conclusion, movie studios should feel braver about bumping up ratings of comic book movies so long as the rating fits the character. Otherwise you'd be getting the "Ultimate Spider-Man" version of Deadpool. Rao knows we don't want that again. Thanks for reading!

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