There’s been a lot of talk in the horror community recently about Predator: Badlands being rated PG-13, but the film hadn’t actually been rated by the MPA until this week. Interviews with the filmmakers that were pulled from set visits had led many to believe that Badlands would likely be released with a PG-13, and […]
There’s been a lot of talk in the horror community recently about Predator: Badlands being rated PG-13, but the film hadn’t actually been rated by the MPA until this week. Interviews with the filmmakers that were pulled from set visits had led many to believe that Badlands would likely be released with a PG-13, and we can now officially confirm that to be the case.
Predator: Badlands has been rated PG-13 by the MPA this week for “sequences of strong sci-fi violence,” making it the very first solo Predator movie to be released with a PG-13 rating.
Outside of the Alien vs. Predator mashup movie, the core Predator franchise has always been a rated R affair, and director Dan Trachtenberg’s two contributions thus far – Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers – have carried that very rating. But the good news here is that Predator: Badlands is really only a PG-13 movie due to the fact that there are no humans in the movie.
That means all the violence in the movie is creature-on-creature or android-related. The MPA is historically more accepting of the violent dispatching of non-humans, with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn being a particularly notable example of the horror hack of using non-red blood. The monsters in the film bleed green, which allowed for Dusk Till Dawn to push the boundaries of bloodshed without being slapped with a higher rating.
With only monsters and androids being dispatched in Predator: Badlands, the film should be able to remain a violent Predator movie within the confines of the PG-13 classification. And Trachtenberg’s idea from the very beginning was indeed for the film to be a PG-13 affair, so this isn’t a case of a rated R movie being reduced to a PG-13 rating by the studio.
As producer Ben Rosenblatt explained to Bloody Disgusting during our visit to the Predator: Badlands set, “We don’t have any humans in the movie, and so we don’t have any human red blood. We’re hoping that’s going to play to our advantage. Which is a way of answering your question, how hard are we going to go?
