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But then we get to the weekend nights and all those teens are not able to enter so even if a NC-17 is booked it often shares the smallest screen in the mutiplex with a foreign minority language film and is limited to a couple screenings a day rather than for noon to midnight on two or three screens that it would have gotten if they made the cuts to have it rated R.
^^^Exactly. Theaters want to run the movies that will garner the largest audiences, and those are PG, PG-13, and R rated films. (The G rating is box office poison as well.)
Okay so people went to see those movies. Then why is the NC-17 rating considered box office poison, if people went to see those movies?
I think you've gotten the reason several times here. It's not necessarily that people won't go see it. Most big national chain theaters have a policy against showing NC-17 movies because they'd be required to station an employee outside that theater entrance to check every ticket and ID of every person going in to make sure they're at least 18. It's a hassle for the theater and a hassle for the customers. That employee would have to stay there through the duration of the film and if it showed all day, they'd have to stay there all day. Theaters don't want to deal with that and the small independent theaters often can't. So they just won't play NC-17 movies.
NC-17 is the child of the old X rating. For about a decade, there were a few films rated X that weren't porno. Most of those eventually got lesser ratings and the "X" became an anathema, since it was so closely connected in the public mind to porno.
Are you saying it doesn't mean only people from North Carolina can't watch the movie until they are 17?
I think you've gotten the reason several times here. It's not necessarily that people won't go see it. Most big national chain theaters have a policy against showing NC-17 movies because they'd be required to station an employee outside that theater entrance to check every ticket and ID of every person going in to make sure they're at least 18. It's a hassle for the theater and a hassle for the customers. That employee would have to stay there through the duration of the film and if it showed all day, they'd have to stay there all day. Theaters don't want to deal with that and the small independent theaters often can't. So they just won't play NC-17 movies.
Oh okay, I thought the theater would say they are not responsible if someone decided to sneak into a movie for older ages, since kids do it all the time.
Oh okay, I thought the theater would say they are not responsible if someone decided to sneak into a movie for older ages, since kids do it all the time.
Adhering to the rating system is voluntary for theaters, but the U.S. government occasionally threatens to crack down it and try to make the ratings law. I have no idea if they could legally do this. Supposedly the rating system is in place to prevent government censorship. But many theaters adhere to it to keep the government out of the movie ratings. And since NC-17 means no one 17 and under allowed under any circumstances, they'd have to check every ID that went into that theater.
^^^Exactly. Theaters want to run the movies that will garner the largest audiences, and those are PG, PG-13, and R rated films. (The G rating is box office poison as well.)
Not today, they are usually PG or higher. The same people who think NC-17 equals porn also think G means "kiddie film" and stay away. Even movies that ARE specifically aimed at kids, like Frozen and Coco, are generally rated PG today. Studios actually go out of their way to include some content in a family film that will insure it gets a PG rather than a G rating.
(This wasn't the case a few decades ago, when G-rated family films did well, but it's definitely been the case for at least the last 20 years. God only knows why.)
The trouble with the G rating is that it lends the impression that a movie is for the kids and probably nothing of interest to most adults. This was originally a misconception that has become more or less true today because the standards for receiving a G have apparently become stricter. Older G-rated movies, even up to the 2000s, could contain mild offensive content; Star Trek The Motion Picture and Planet of the Apes (both rated G) had mild language, violence, and even brief nudity. Now it seems that anything that could potentially scare a child, or upset a parent, falls into the catch-all category 'Thematic Elements', requiring a PG rating. Under that standard, most G-rated films of the past would be rated PG today; and some have been re-rated, like the Wizard of Oz, first rated G in 1970 and rerated PG in 2013.
Older G-rated movies, even up to the 2000s, could contain mild offensive content; Star Trek The Motion Picture and Planet of the Apes (both rated G) had mild language, violence, and even brief nudity. Now it seems that anything that could potentially scare a child, or upset a parent, falls into the catch-all category 'Thematic Elements', requiring a PG rating.
The TV Tropes article I quoted specifically mentions this, and states that it's essentially impossible for any live-action movie to get a G-rating today. The few films that do get rated G nowadays are all animated. Quite a change from the days when films like Planet of the Apes and Gone with the Wind were rated G! Apparently this is a side-effect of creating the PG-13 category: some films that would have been rated PG earlier got shifted to PG-13, and as if to fill a void, this resulted in the truly "general audience" G films being shifted into PG, leaving only the really kiddie-oriented films left in the G category.
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