I got a press release a few days ago announcing that New in Town, a romantic comedy starring Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr., was recently re-edited so that it would get a PG rating instead of its original PG-13 rating.
The press release said the companies behind the film, which opens next week, had “decided to delete strong language from the film, making NEW IN TOWN more accessible and acceptable to the entire family. The film . . . has received strong early word-of-mouth from family-friendly audiences.”
What the press release didn’t mention is that, according to the MPAA, the film still earned its PG rating “for language and some suggestive material.”
At any rate, a day or two later, Angela Walker of Christians in Cinema stated that she was one of a “handful of reviewers from Christian outlets” who saw the film at a press junket two weeks earlier and objected to the language, thereby motivating the studio to make the changes.
Variety, in a brief story on the re-edits and the re-rating, also suggested that the changes may have been made because recent PG-rated films like Marley & Me and Bride Wars have “exceeded expectations” at the box office.
I don’t know quite what to make of this, myself.
It’s not uncommon for films to be re-edited for “family viewing” when they come out on video, even when they were rated PG to begin with. But I have always found this practice kind of strange, as though the studios were openly telling their customers, “Hey, this movie used to cross the line, but now it’s merely pushing the boundaries of what you might find acceptable.”
What’s more, any child who sees these DVD covers lying around the house is going to get curious and wonder what the “real” version of these movies is like. And it won’t be hard to find out. So in that sense, these discs may be rather counter-productive.
Of course, we often hear about movies that had to be re-edited so that they could be rated R instead of NC-17, or PG-13 instead of R. But those ratings were all designed to push the boundaries, in some sense, so it’s no big deal when a studio publicly aims for that kind of rating — especially since we all know the “unrated” version of the film is going to come out on DVD anyway. In those cases, the theatrical release serves as a sort of preview of the even edgier DVD to come.
But the PG rating is supposed to feel “safer” than that, right?
Would anyone in the “family-friendly audience” really want to discover this movie in the theatre, and possibly come to like it and share it with their children and so on, knowing that there is an already-completed PG-13 version — or “unrated” version! — that could be released on DVD down the road?
Or would they really find the movie appealing now, whereas they might have had no interest in it before, simply because it was “edited for family viewing” only a week or two before it came out?
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