The Bunker: Future of R Rated Movies
Hi y’all, it’s Anoyster here with our first installment of The Bunker, a roundtable alongside Ramses and the Manly Movie head honcho Knight Rider. What I want to bring up as a point of discussion is where the R rated movie is going forward and where do we think it should be going.
Knight Rider: The R-Rated movie is fast becoming seen as “unconventional”. I think Stallone coming out and declaring The Expendables 2 PG-13 was the real wake up call for me, where ratings were really dictating what a movie should be. It used to be the other way around, you make the movie as you would have, then you have it rated. Predator 2 is a famous example of a movie that just stubbornly couldn’t even get an R-Rating, it was so violent.
Ramses: Well the upside is that I noticed a recent trend in movie trailers making a fuss out of the fact that they’re rated r. There’s some who seem to appreciate the value of it.
A: Outside the occasional oddity like the new 300 sequel/prequel it seems like the powers that be are content on relying in some flash-in-the-pan movie on coming up and quenching the thirst of the R rated demographic. Even then those movies don’t do much of a mark at the box office but can become big on the home market. It must be lucrative since a good chunk of the old school guys are solely doing straight-to-video R rated action but it’s nickel & dime shit instead of a big event movie.
KR: Problem is, even then it’s not guaranteed to be worthy if it’s Rated-R. That compounds things, 300: Rise of an Empire is not a good movie.
R: Another thing is that the recent performance of Sabotage, The Last Stand and Bullet to the Head are more indicative of Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s fading light. Olympus Has Fallen did pretty well with fresh faced Butler and it was just an okay R-Rater.
But I think we need to keep highlighting that such and such a movie will be Rated-R, as a selling point. As a promotional point.
A: That is key, while the concept of a star-vehicle isn’t as pronounced anymore, I feel like the older audiences gravitate towards a strong lead and Butler gave them that, at least to a point. We need strong NEW leads for our R rated blockbusters. What the great leading men of past have in common is charisma and screen presence over other attributes and no one in the business seems to understand that.
R: Look at 2015 and it’s not a good picture. A big, big lineup of movies and the bulk of them are built on foundations to suit the family. R movies can’t and won’t be able to compete. It’s sad to say but we’re probably lucky a few of our favorites came out this year instead and not in the 2015 slaughterhouse. We’re maligned further by the month and I can only despair.
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