MPAA System: Should it be changed?

Hey Everyone!
So I live in a predominately LDS (Mormon) run city. I hear constantly how bad a movie is because of mainly two factors: Language and Sexual Content. My opinion is that violence is far worse than sexual content and language in the right context and given how much it is adding to the story isn't a real issue. Below is a general outline of the ratings system from mpaa.org check it out!

My question is this to all of us film fiends; What are your thoughts on how the MPAA rates movies, is it flawed? Should it be adjusted or completely overhauled to work better? Please lets get a great conversation going on this!
Love you guys!

Freddy got Fingered - Extremely crude, disturbing, disgusting, annoying, painful, morally repugnant and is horrible even from the most objective viewpoint. Yet is only rated R.

The King's Speech - Great film, has zero violence whatsoever, but a couple of f words give it the same R rating.

Yep, the MPAA rating is crap and should be changed.

The idea of the rating system I have no problem with. But the inconsistencies the MPAA deals out and their hang ups on certain subject matter does need to be changed. Like their hang up with the F word. One F bomb gets you a PG-13 but two is an automatic R rating? Why? Especially if it is a documentary where the subject matter is not violent and or sexual, but has lots of bad language.

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Whatever you change it to, people on both sides of the question (is it too strict or too lenient?) will still complain.

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Excellent topic. I've heard it said that PG-13 films make the most money as opposed to PG or R. So film makers intentionally will throw in 1 F word to bump the rating from PG to PG-13. They make more money that way.

Personally I would like to see the film maker have the ability to bump the rating 1 step up if they choose (but not 1 step down).

I've seen a lot of good PG material films that would be suitable for children as well as adults have the F word dropped into them. Too many family films have to have the 1 F bomb, just so that they can be bumped from PG to PG-13.

Yes, I know this thread hasn't been active for 5 years, but I have opinions:

The MPA (formerly MPAA) system doesn't work because there is no rubric or actual rules that they follow when rating a film. The idea was that as parents' morals and values shift, so will the letter ratings. This worked back when you could only see movies in theaters, because nearly all of the movies available would have been rated recently. With the advent of home video, the system began to fall apart. The MPA does not re-rate movies, so ratings are wildly inconsistent across decades. To make matters worse, PG-13 was only added in 1987, so movies which may have gotten that rating now are either in the PG or R categories. (For example, Beetlejuice, Spaceballs, Big, 16 Candles, and Caddyshack II each have 1 use of the f-word. All are rated PG.)

I believe movies should not be given a single letter, but a score in five categories: language, sex/nudity, violence, smoking/drugs/alcohol, and frightening/intense scenes. (Yes, I totally stole this from IMDb. It's a good system.) This way, there would be more consistency over time, with the added benefit of giving parents more information about the content of a film.

I pay no attention to ratings. None whatsoever.

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I pay attention for certain films because it indicates what I can expect (IE: a PG-13 horror film can only go so far, which can limit the level of tension). But more to the point, even if we don't care for viewing purposes, the ratings still exert significant influence on which kinds of things are made, and how they are made, albeit in ways where we have very little in the way of counterfactuals.

Obviously, too, ratings are important if one has kids, which I don’t.

Why bother changing the ratings? Everybody has their own ax to grind about what kind of content is OK or not OK, whether it's sex, violence, race, language, stereotypes or whatever. Personally, I think movies that are just plain dumb, should get a D rating, but do I have any suggestion about how to do that? There are so many places where anybody who is interested can read movie reviews that the ratings seem like an anachronism.

With kids, often the big schism of parents is about sex vs violence, with parents weighing in on the evils or one, the other or both. I recall when I was a kid, seeing movies with blood, guts and gore, decapitations, criminals who got away with crime and suggestions that the church was evil, but if there was a breast in view, all of a sudden, it became evil stuff that would harm innocent kids, even kids who'd seen their siblings nursed.

I suggest that people who are worried about what their kids see or what adults are allowed to see just check a few reviews on line. There's no way to satisfy everybody. If nothing else, the current system puts out an alarm but it's so easy to get so much information that the ratings really don't seem to mean much and there's no way to specify enough to satisfy the spectrum of the moralisms that people have.

I am kinda sympathetic to the idea that ratings don't really matter very much any more, yeah. Like the industry and culture just sort of moved right past the issue entirely.

I agree.

When it comes to content (and I get that some people don't screen for content and that's fine!) I want the equivalent of a food label. I just want to know what's in it and a relative sense of how graphic it is.

I regularly use the IMDb guide to screen for things like animal cruelty, sexual violence, and other elements when I know I'm just not in a good place to deal with them.

I think that the best systems allow the consumer to be informed, so that they can make decisions aligned with their own personal needs.

IMDB is great for this, but also, people who have those very specific concerns like kid movies, religious heresy, etc, should probably check with a relevant publication since it's mainly movie fans like us that know about that site. Our ability to be offended has expanded by orders of magnitude since the days when sex/nudity was the main thing that determined ratings. It seems like the number of lines that can be crossed just keeps getting bigger and the one-size fits all approach just doesn't work.

I don't think it's about our "ability" to be offended. I think it's more about realizing that different people are offended by different things. I didn't bat an eye at the explicit sex scenes in Stranger By the Lake and was far more "offended" by the use of tripwires on horses in the stunts in Stagecoach.

I've shared about this subject many times. Siskel and Ebert had a great suggestion years ago: to use an "A" (for Adult) rating for films that had subject matter interesting to more mature or older audiences. The title "Adult" would seem to suggest sexual or violent themes, but those are already included.

My other beef is that many popular films are rated too low. Lots of PG-13s ought to be Rs, whereas a good many Rs really ought to be NC-17s.

I've noticed over the past 30-40 years that films have gradually become more offensive in their use of violence, gore, gutter language, and the like; but the ratings haven't reflected the trend.

Yes! The Nutrition Facts is exactly what I was thinking of! I suppose it might be harder to fit on stuff like dvd cases, but they could at least put one on the posters and online. Maybe there could be some sort of condensed version for smaller spaces?

I feel as though some of the posters do have it? Certainly the ratings screen on DVDs has it. (Like "Rated R for violence, sexuality, and a scene of torture").

There's a movie called This Film is Not Yet Rated that points out the flaws in the ratings system, and especially some of the double standards.

I also appreciate the descriptive emphasis on the IMDb pages, though there are some amazing entries. Someone has since edited it, but the page about The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover used to have an entry that read (MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS)

Another interesting resource is DoestheDogDie, which has, like, a billion categories. I think that site is overall more useful if you have specific, serious phobias (like needles or bugs) that wouldn't be considered "objectionable" content, per se.

I like the IMDB-style category breakdown. I lean on the Parent's Guide on there pretty often if I plan to watch something with a group.*


I think with the current rating system, you'll keep running into the problem where the highest rating becomes commercially unviable for one reason or another.*

"Adult" sounds too sexy.*Might as well rate things on the Peter Meter at that point.*(R.I.P. Al Goldstein.)

The MPAA started putting those descriptions on in the mid 90s, but again, they are just made up without any specific conventions or guidelines and there is a lot of inconsistency between them. (What's the difference between "violence" and "action violence," for example?) Also a lot of times they cite "thematic elements," which may have been their reasoning for assigning the rating, but it doesn't exactly help parents who are trying to figure out what's in the film.

Lol yes I rewatched it recently, which is actually why I revived this topic. I was absolutely obsessed with the rating system in like 7th/8th grade so I've seen TFNYR quite a few times. Unfortunately, there aren't many unbiased sources out there bc the MPA is so secretive.

In 2018 the MPAA put out a really funny report for its 50th anniversary. If you go down to the Q and A section, half the questions are just them vehemently denying things Kirby Dick said, even when they were obviously true statements.

The great (and not-so-great) thing about the IMDb parents' guide is that anyone can add anything at anytime, and it doesn't get processed and approved like other contributions. I spend a lot of time just correcting people's spelling and grammar lol. Also removing people's opinions is always fun. Some funny ones I've come across:

On Romeo + Juliet (1996): "During the party sequence, Romeo takes a pill which is implied to be ecstasy. This was NOT in the original play and it is UNACCEPTABLE. I CANNOT SHOW MY STUDENTS THIS VERSION BECAUSE OF IT. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY THEY PUT THIS HORRIBLE DRUG IN THIS MOVIE."

Hamilton: "Multiple uses of the Lord's name in vain. And this is supposed to be a disney movie????? SHAME ON YOU!!!!!!!"

Usually someone corrects the bigger movies, but if you dig you can find some really funny ones.