Are R-rated comic book films dead?

Success
The most successful R-rated movie of all time, if you discount the phenomenon of The Passion Of The Christ (with its $US370m US gross), was The Matrix Reloaded, with $US738m worldwide, $US281m of which came from the US. The rest of the top ten list though is packed out with few films that touch the comic book sphere, or a good number that are over ten years old. The first Beverly Hills Cop, The Exorcist, Saving Private Ryan, Wedding Crashers, Gladiator, Terminator 2 and Pretty Woman are all in there.

And let's do some quick sums, too. Take the entirety of the top 10 R-rated movies list at the US box office (including Passion Of The Christ), and the total American gross for them is $US2.327bn. Repeat the exercise in the PG-13 category, and the total is $US4.127bn. For G and PG-rated movies, it's $US3.696bn. The numbers don't lie, and this is why we're in a world where a tepid Incredible Hulk reboot will be outgrossing the far more ambitious Watchmen movie. It comes in part to the length of the film, but more tellingly, to the rating bestowed upon it.

Worried?
It's not tricky, therefore, to see why Warner Bros and Marvel are looking to go the way they are. Comic book movies, particularly superhero ones, are big business now, and the people who fund them want them to play to the broadest audience possible. So should we be worried about this?

Probably not, actually. Because there's a mitigating factor or two here that makes all this a far easier pill to swallow than it first appears.

Perhaps the main one is the relative weakness of the ratings boards in the first place. We love The Dark Knight, but even we sat there and wondered how it got such a relaxed certificate. And the truth is that the MPAA and BBFC are businesses in their own right, too. It's actually in their interests to make sure these films are seen as broadly as possible, and while that doesn't mean letting any old movie through, a suggested cut or two here and there is the price a studio will pay for getting their film through. In the case of The Dark Knight, surely the interrogation sequence alone should have been enough to get a stiffer rating?

The long and short of that is that there's room in the PG-13 bracket, until the next media campaign begins to toughen things up, for dark and brooding superhero movies. And that's something the studios, we expect, will be looking to take even more advantage of.

The second saviour of all of this is DVD. Directors of comic book and superhero movies have long since realised that the home entertainment market is the place for a harder cut of a movie. It's almost the trade off: release the PG-13 edition of the film in cinemas, and we'll let you have the bits you wanted to keep in on the DVD itself.

The downside, of course, is that it's disappointing that we'll not see a film so overtly aimed at adult comic book enthusiasts on the level of Watchmen for some time now, although we suspect that the door's not shut entirely there. The DVD monies for the film, we'd predict, will be plentiful, and that may unlock one or two possibilities in the future. It may also mean that a bit more scope opens up in the mid-range budget field, although in the current climate, we wouldn't expect progress there for a while.

Ultimately though, this is, if anything, a sign of the movie industry's dependence on the comic book world for its genuine big hitters, and big new franchises, though. It's a by-product of us seeing so many comic franchises realised on the big screen, and right now, it's hard to think of too many films where the price of a PG-13 rating has been too tough to pay.

Whether that remains the case, of course, remains to be seen...