Why isn’t the Venom movie rated “R”? Was it even considered?
Ever since the arrival of the original Deadpool in theaters, which set records for a Rated-R film and a superhero film at the same time, many superhero films have considered going for that hard R rating. However, one that wasn’t even considered was Venom. For despite being an anti-hero with horror tendencies, the producers of the film weren’t even going to entertain an “R” rating.
“To me, R is not a consideration,” executive producer Avi Arad told ComicBook. “Can you get away with not R so that other people can see? So that younger people can see? I made an animated show. There was a lot of Venom in there. It was in ’94. There’s no reason to put in violence. To define what Venom is as violence. He’s not. He’s the lethal protector, which is a very different thing. We want to be really true to the comics. Today, in CGI and stuff, we can make Venom bite your head. But we don’t have to show the head going side to side like, ‘that actually tastes good.’ It’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you finally understood, is that a bad guy? Yeah.”
A reason for this may be that the character could be tied with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Marvel/Disney doesn’t want an R-rated film to be tied with that. The movie releases on October 5th.
If the people behind the movie were upfront about the rating, it probably would’ve been less controversial.
Now this is worrying me, because kids who see this film would end up getting nightmares of a scary-looking character with a scary voice, and end up seeing the possible violence in the film as well. Heck, there’s TV spots for Venom on Nickelodeon during the evening!