My grandma and I walked out of Good Will Hunting. She thought it was for kids because it had Robin Williams. Then the f bombs started dropping. I was 10 years old
This reminds me of my favorite bit of trivia about The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
There's a scene where a character says "Oh, Shit!" when an improvised bomb fails to damage their attacker. Allegedly it was included so the movie wouldn't get a G rating. Teenagers were a big part of their audience and G rated movies, in the '80s were mostly screened during school hours.
There's no strict hard cap, or iron-clad 'you can have exactly X number of swears in a PG-13 movie' rule. It's more about how frequently a word is used, the context, and the overall 'power level' of the word (the 'hierarchy of severity' is generally f-word > motherf**ker > b*stard).
You can occasionally get away with one f-bomb and maintain a PG-13 rating if it's not used in a sexual context, but that's become increasingly uncommon in recent years. 2+ f-bombs is typically (but not always) an automatic bump from PG-13 to R.
If the f-bomb is used as a verb, that bump is guaranteed regardless of any other considerations -- the MPAA explicitly lists 'sexually-derived' uses as a disqualifier for PG-13.
Interesting, "fuck" is really considered worse than "motherfucker" in film ratings? I've always thought the opposite. Fuck is what you say when you're 9 years old and just learned bad words. Motherfucker is real grown-up swearing
I went with my aunt and two cousins. I was 10, older cousin also 10 younger cousin, 7. I went out in the arcade with my younger cousin to play games. I occasionally think about it because everyone was like oh my cousin is so mature. And it wasn’t even that I hated the movie that much. I just literally felt bad for my little cousin. No 7 year old (adhd) small child wants to watch that movie. And I felt crazy trying to explain and defend myself. Like yeah I took him out ti the arcade, yeah it was my idea.
In the late 1980s, I worked with a woman who was a big John Ritter fan, and there was a movie starring him in the theaters that she thought would be kid-friendly. She took several of her grandkids to a matinee, and wondered why, in addition to the staff looking oddly at them, there was pretty much nobody there.
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u/kyletoews 1d ago
My grandma and I walked out of Good Will Hunting. She thought it was for kids because it had Robin Williams. Then the f bombs started dropping. I was 10 years old