10 PG-13 Movies That Should Have Been Rated R

It's hard being a Hollywood studio. You want to give your directors free reign to include as many boobs, corpses and 'f**ks' as possible to draw in the older audiences, but what about the children? Won't somebody please think of the children!? Simpsons references aside, Hollywood has long struggled to maximize their audiences to draw in the most money while still rating movies appropriately for kids.

David Opie

Published: Dec 23, 2014 12:02 pm

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8) The Dark Knight (2008)

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Batman is one of the most iconic characters in all of pop culture, and earlier films starring the Caped Crusader proved that his marketing potential among children is almost unparalleled. Who didn’t own a toy Batmobile growing up, right!? It’s no surprise then that the MPAA rated Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight PG-13, despite it being possibly the darkest superhero movie ever made.

While they acknowledged that The Dark Knight contains “intense sequences of violence and some menace,” the MPAA didn’t really factor in how extreme these scenes really were. Sure, we didn’t actually see The Joker impale the man’s face on a pencil, but the implication was disturbing enough.

The Dark Knight is one sequel that genuinely lives up to its name, yet the MPAA refused to learn from their previous mistake, designating Nolan’s follow-up The Dark Knight Rises a PG-13, too.

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Author

David Opie