Given the success of films like Deadpool and Logan at the box office, you would think that nearly every comic book movie is now leaning towards having an R-rating. Before these films, studios wouldn’t even dare to enter that kind of territory but now that they see the rating hasn’t deterred ticket sales, they might be changing their tune. One studio that’s not changing its tune is Marvel. When talking about these two films, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said they have no plans to crossover into R-rated territory and he explains what he took away from them saying:
“My takeaway from both of those films is not the R rating; it’s the risk they took, the chances they took, the creative boundaries that they pushed. That should be the takeaway for everyone.”
I couldn’t agree more with Feige. The reason these two movies had an R-Rating was because they had to have an R-rating, not because they simply said, “let’s put in material that’ll get this movie an R-Rating.” Deadpool’s entire theme is parody and contradicting all that we know about superheroes. So what are superheroes? They are inherently “good” which includes the way they look, dress, act and particularly speak. Superheroes are clean cut and you’d never catch them with a foul mouth. The whole point of Deadpool is to laugh in the face of that.
With regard to Logan, this is a movie that needed to be rated R not because of a shallow desire to copy Deadpool’s path but because in order to tell the complete story the way it should be told. The movie wanted to explore more violent and gruesome themes to get into the characters at a level a PG-13 film might not have been able to do. That’s why it was rated R.
Feige is right. A movie rating has very little to do with the quality of a movie. It’s merely a way to assign a level of appropriateness for audiences of a certain age. Making a movie R-rated for the sake of making it R-Rated rarely if ever works on its own merit. The movie is always going to have to be a quality film, first and foremost.
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