PG-13

That's the magic rating if you want to secure funding for your big-budget movie. Good luck if you want to make an expensive movie for adults nowadays. No studio is going give you $150 million if the kiddies can't watch.

 

Many times you don't need a huge budget to make a good movie, in fact it's often inversely proportional. But it really struck me just how hard it is to go big and grown-up when I learned that the movie adaptation of the great H.P. Lovecraft book At the Mountains of Madness was cancelled because director Guillermo del Toro refused to make it anything less than a solid "R". Quite frankly, the material demands it in this case. This movie was cancelled despite having James Cameron producing and Tom Cruise starring.

 

Apparently we adults just don't go to big action movies. Or when we do we bring our kids.

 

Typically what happens is they chop the movie to PG-13 and release an unrated version on disc. But that's not the same as designing the movie to be R rated from the start. It's more of an add-on thing.