Why None of the X-Men Team Movies Have Been R-Rated

The X-Men are set to return to the big screen in Dark Phoenix but after the success of Deadpool and Logan, why haven't Marvel's mutants been given the R-rated treatment?

That question was put before Dark Phoenix director Simon Kinberg and director Hutch Parker during a talk with Collider.

"There really hasn't, mostly because the depth and the complexity of the characters, there's been nothing we haven't been able to tackle within a PG-13," Parker said. "Logan was driven by wanting to do something different with the nature of his condition, with the way in which we expressed and represented the violence, with the accumulation of that in a life. So there were very specific ideas that Jim wanted to explore that required an R. In this case, we would and could have had the conversation, but the material didn't really warrant it in that same way and I think certainly the way which [Kinberg's] explored the character-based issues of Dark Phoenix I'd say is darker and in many ways much more intense without necessarily requiring R-rating."

"Kinberg added, "I think when you look at Dark Knight, that was a PG-13 movie and that tackled some really mature subject matter and was edgier and darker and more intense than previous movies in the genre had been, but that was still a PG-13. So like I've said, there was no need for extra swear words. The level of violence in this is intense for PG-13 movie but is still within the bounds of that."

While Dark Phoenix isn't taking Logan's R-rated approach, it did borrow the idea of leaving X-Men out of the title.

"I wanted to call it Dark Phoenix in again very much the way we wanted to call Logan 'Logan' as opposed to 'X-Men: Logan' to indicate that it's a different kind of film and to indicate that it's a more character-driven movie," Kinberg said. "And for me, and Hutch, as people who worked on X-Men III: The Last Stand, that didn't have any trace of Dark Phoenix in the title, we really wanted to indicate that this is the Dark Phoenix story and that she's at the center of this story, she's the A-plot of this story, everything around this story revolves really centrally around Jean/Dark Phoenix as really the subject of the movie, not the object of the movie."

Would you like to see an R-rated X-Men movie? Let us know in the comments!

Dark Phoenix opens June 7, 2019.

Other upcoming X-Men movies include the PG-13 re-release of Deadpool 2 on December 21st, The New Mutants on August 2, 2019, and Gambit in March 2020.