Extra, Extra!: Mad Max: Fury Road Is Rated "R"

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

The established wisdom for "genre" films nowadays is to aim for a PG-13 rating.  It lets you verge on the sexiness of R-rated titles while still giving you access to as broad of an audience as possible.  While hardcore action and horror fans especially decry the limits that that particular rating places on a movie, the simple fact is that more people will see it because less teenagers will be turned away at the box office.

While superhero - and especially Marvel - films have found the perfect balance of visceral intensity and plot to comfortably fit into that rating, "straight" action and "straight" horror (and even most "straight" comedies) generally need the "R" rating if they're going to be any good at all.  If I would have realized that The Lazarus Effect was rated PG-13 beforehand, for instance, I wouldn't have been nearly as excited about it as I was at the beginning of the year.

This is why Mad Max: Fury Road - a post-apocalyptic action sequel that I had until now hadn't been especially interested in - getting an "R" rating is such exciting news.  It's willing to exclude a large swath of the people who would actively seek it out in order to make it as worth seeing as possible.  Paired with its increasingly solid-looking trailers, it's shaping up to the the Kingsman of the summer: a gritty, no-holds-barred action flick that's willing to go to the places that it needs to go, ticket sales be damned.

Obviously Warner Bros. isn't acting altruistically when they opt to keep that kind of a rating.  The company clearly hopes to be the "adult" alternative to Age of Ultron and other family friendly summer blockbusters.  They figure that they can't compete with the Avengers sequel for the teen market, so they might as well not bother going head to head with them for it at all.  When parents drop their kids off to see Stark slip into the Hulkbuster, Warner Bros hopes that their parents will buy tickets for the next theater over.

So are you planning to see Mad Max:Fury Road when it comes out in May?  Does its new rating change anything for you?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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