Movie Rating System Revisited

DecentFilms has a brief article about how the movie rating system has evolved over time. Popular opinion says the ratings are getting looser, but there is some analysis that says that the ratings are actually stricter now than they used to be.

That seems to clash with common sense, which says that movies can get away with things now with a lower rating that they couldn't before...yet, I can remember seeing both Airplane! movies 15 years ago or so--both of which are listed as PG, yet I could have sworn they both had rampant nudity in them. (I haven't viewed them recently to...uh, confirm that, though) Plus, Whale Rider still has a PG-13 rating for...I have no idea what reason.

Yet on the other side, "The Blues Brothers" got an R for profanity, when (again, according to my 15 year+ recollection) it didn't have any more profanity than you can hear in a PG-13 movie nowadays anyway.

I don't think you'll be able to conclude the rating system is getting looser or stricter since you can think of examples for both. The main problem is the rating system is arbitrary--with different criteria being used from year to year, and often from movie to movie. Even after adding the 'PG-13' in 1984, the current ratings are too broad, and really don't offer more than a very general judgment of the movie's content.

If ratings are getting more permissive (and generally speaking, I think that is probably the case), then ironically it might be partially due to the success of those who don't want inappropriate material in movies. Due to the teen market, and the number of adults who won't see R movies, it is well known that R movies tend to make less money than PG or PG-13 movies will--which on one hand encourages (or should encourage) studios to make more 'family oriented' movies, but on the other hand gives movie studios the financial incentive to broaden the PG and PG-13 ratings as much as they can to cover their movie. This leads to films being clipped as close to the ratings border as they possibly can, and often simply applying pressure to the ratings board to broaden the rating without making any cuts (it's all arbitrary, anyway...) The end result is that while a greater percentage of movies nowadays are not R, there's an increased amount of R-rated material in PG-13 movies which hurts those who were trying to avoid that kind of material in the first place.

The point: (as I've argued before) we need a new ratings system...and soon!