I’m watching Monday Night Football and now seen two movie trailers that looked like Rated R, but both turned out to be PG-13. So how does the rating system work? Checklists? Focus group gut checks? This is probably easy to google but I’d like to have it eli5.
In: 5
At least in America, there’s a special group of people whose job it is to provide ratings for films and trailers. It’s basically just their opinion, although there are certain conventions about what sorts of things are appropriate or inappropriate for a given rating.
MPAA… Motion Picture something something.
Answer. There is literally a secret group that watches unreleased movies and subjectively rates them on unknown criteria. If the studio doesn’t like the rating. They can make a different cut of the movie and resubmit.
Fun fact. These ratings aren’t required, they’re technically voluntarily done by the filmmakers/studios.
Along with the other answers, you should check out a documentary called “This Film Is Not Yet Rated”
It’s kinda hard to find, because well, it’s not rated.
Organisations exist to give appropriate age ratings to film & TV. The US has MPAA, the UK has BBFC and so on.
A group of people watch the film or show and then consider what age rating is appropriate based on their guidelines. The guidelines change overtime too and some content that was only deemed appropriate for an R rated film may now be considered suitable for PG-13.
Guidelines vary around the world based on cultural differences too. France is known for having very lax age ratings and some 18/R rated stuff is only rated 12 there.
There is an excellent documentary on the subject that I highly recommend called “This Film is Not Yet Rated”.
The whole premise of the documentary is that they hire a group of PIs to find the names and addresses of the members of the MPAA (the secret panel in charge of rating movies) and the best part is, *they have to submit the movie to that panel to get it rated by them*.
There’s also a ton of interviews from some of the best directors in the biz talking about how silly and arbitrary the rating process is.
One of the best documentaries I’ve ever watched.
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