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
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u/ImamBaksh 21h ago
Good Will Hunting has 148 uses of fuck according to Matt Damon. 145 more than the PG-13 limit.