X-Men Producer Simon Kinberg On Franchise’s Future R-Ratings

20th Century Fox has struck gold with their R-rated comic book movies. Logan has come out of the gates hot, having a $237.8M global opening — which shattered the $170 million is was predicted to do just a week ago. Deadpool, as you know, pocketed nearly $800 million at the global box office last year and smashed numerous records held by other R-rated films.

However, if you think those films solely benefited from their R-ratings, you would be mistaken. Yes, it provided both films with more freedom to add as much violence and profanity as they thought necessary, but you will also notice that both films put a priority on personal stakes over global stakes, limited the number of principal roles to tell a more intimate story, and neither of them needed to blow up landmarks and major cities to captivate the audience (which it hardly ever does).

So with all that success, one has to wonder: Would 20th Century Fox ever consider making a future X-Men film R-rated?

“I think that each movie, we figure out what the story is, then we figure out the requirements of the story, and if the requirements of the story are R-rated, it’s R-rated,” Simon Kinberg, who wrote and is rumored to be directing the next X-Men film, told Slash Film. We don’t go into movies saying, this one’s gonna be R-rated, this one’s gonna be PG-13, we don’t make those decisions before we make the decisions of story. My instinct is that the Deadpool universe, which is Deadpool 2 and potentially X-Force, they require being R-rated, because that’s just Deadpool’s voice in the comic, and it’s Deadpool’s voice in the movie so far. I think audiences would be disappointed if they got a PG-13 Deadpool movie. So my easy bet would be Deadpool 2 is R-rated and most movies within that sort of shared but separate universe would be likewise.”

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