Terminator: Genisys aiming for moderate PG-13 rating

After the complete failure of Terminator Salvation, you would think that the head honchos making the decisions for the major Hollywood studios would have learned a thing or two by now.

An old adage springs to mind after the failure of taking violent movies from the 80s, rebooting them as watered down PG-13 crapfests and going for the widest possible return in the market ‘fool me once, shame on you, …fool me twice, shame on me’. In other words, audiences that were left hugely unsatisfied by the terrible Terminator Salvation, in theory, should have learned their lesson by now and they are simply not buying into it anymore. Look at the failures of recent watered down remakes (with terrible returns at the Box Office) such as, Fright Night, Total Recall and Robocop to name a few. People want a good bit of meat they can chew on, …rare, bare and bloody.

Jai Courtney – who plays Kyle Reese in the new film (terrible casting) – dropped the bombshell over at The Arnold Fans. Apparently, it is his understanding that Genysis (the marketing department are going to have a hard time with that spelling gimmick) is going to come out of the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating review process with a moderate PG-13 rating and he chucked this in too: “I would love to see it be rated R, but I don’t think it will. I think in this day and age, it’s much more likely to be PG-13. There were no f-bombs. But there’ll be a healthy amount of movie violence.”

Now it makes us pretty nervous over here at FTN when people attached to a film have to defend its rating. It’s almost like a disclosure. Stallone did it with The Expendables 3 and single-handedly ruined his own franchise.

It comes as no surprise to anyone that the MPAA are ok when it comes to violence as opposed to swearing, nudity and graphic sex scenes. Also, the last decade or so has seen a massive shift moving away from R-rated fare and playing it safe with a more marketable rating – and this is especially true when it comes to bigger budgeted movies where producers have to recoup massive budget costs and marketing costs. Occasionally we are treated to a nice hardcore R-rated movie, but this usually comes from smaller studios were there is less of a return to be made.

Terminator Salvation – despite being rated PG-13 – failed to recoup its budget back and was pretty much a disaster in every aspect from the storyline and the lack of suspense, to the directing and that sterile look that one will tend to see in almost all of Michael Bay’s movies.

Terminator and Robocop both originated as hard R movies, which started out as original projects. There was less investment in the money making side of things and far more placed in the quality of the finished product. Perhaps Hollywood should be less worried about their profit margin and more concerned about the quality of the product they’re selling. It’s ground that has been covered many times now.

Jai Courtney also confirmed that this will be star Arnold Schwarzenegger’s last outing in the series. He has a digitally rendered cameo in Salvation that served as more of a gimmick that anything else really. Courtney chipped in: “Hard to imagine a Terminator film without Arnold, … I think the plan is do the next 2 back to back in 2016.”

Sounds messy. Pitch in your thoughts in the comments section.

Terminator: Genisys will be in theaters everywhere July 1.