The MPA is a mystery. Very few of us, filmmakers included, don’t really understand how the ratings board operates, and why they find certain things offensive enough to warrant a PG-13, an R, or even an NC-17. You won’t believe the insane rule that they have when it comes to rating sex scenes. That rule basically came into play recently when Ana De Armas’ Marilyn Monroe movie, Blonde, bore the complicated NC-17 rating. But did you also know that the MPA could award R ratings simply because they felt weird about the kind of movie that a filmmaker was trying to make? This is what Zack Snyder shared recently following a screening of his Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which had to work overtime to get down to the friendlier PG-13 rating.
Snyder recently presided over a three-day celebration of his DC Movies, lovingly dubbed SnyderCon by the attendees. A Q-and-A session followed the Batman v Superman screening (which I was lucky enough to host), and the conversation came around to the R rating that BvS kept getting. You just won’t believe why. Snyder’s visual effects artist, John “D.J.” DesJardin, joined the post-screening panel and reminisced about the creative team’s fight to trim the film down to meet the MPA’s standards. As he recalled:
Remember when we were, you kept coming back to me saying, ‘We have to, the MPA wants us to take… remember we couldn't do the blood splat on the wall, from the crate. Which is in the (version) that you like. But we kept taking all those things out, and it was still getting an R rating. And then you got that note from them. ‘Well, we just think that Batman's too mean to Superman.’ (laughs) And we're like, ‘Can you really comment on that?’
The “blood splat” that D.J. DesJardin referred to happens in the Batman warehouse fight. That scene alone is one of the reasons why Ben Affleck is the best Batman of all time. In case you haven’t watched that sequence in a while, it’s worth revisiting:
In all honesty, though, Zack Snyder also confessed to being really confused by the complaints of the MPA… mainly because he didn’t think that this was something they had any right to govern. As he told the crowd gathered in Pasadena to watch this cut of the movie, he explained:
I didn't think that was, like, in your domain to just not like the idea of them fighting. And so now it's R? They were just like, ‘We think it's rude that they're fighting.’ And I was like, ‘I'm sorry? It's in the title. … This is an NC 17. This is an X. ‘Is there any way you could cut them fighting out? That'd be cool. How about they just team up and like each other? What about that?’ … ‘But can't they just like, you know, maybe they argue at the first act, but then they shake hands and then they fight the bad guy together.’ I go, ‘Well they kind of fight the bad guy together at the end! Didn't you see that?’ And they're like, ‘Eh, there's a lot of fighting before that happens.’
For the time being, the SnyderVerse is stalled at three movies, given the fact that Warner Bros. let Snyder complete his “Snyder Cut” of Justice League. The studio now plans to go in new directions with these Upcoming DC Movies, under the guidance of James Gunn. Hopefully the MPA won’t find any of them to be too mean.
