Good Question: How Are Movie Ratings Decided?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is rated PG-13, causing some parents to think twice before taking their kids to see it.
PG-13 has been the most common parental rating for more than a decade, making up more than half the movies and bringing in twice as much money as those rated R and G.
The ratings system has been in place since 1968, the year "Rosemary's Baby" was rated R and "Planet of the Apes" was given a G.
It was started by Jack Valenti, who was then the chief of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), to consolidate the 45 censor boards that already existed.
"Jack came up with the idea that by giving advance cautionary warnings to parents, so they could make choices for their family and their children, that filmmakers could put whatever they wanted to into the film," Joan Graves, chair of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA) for the MPAA, said.
The rating is decided by a group of parents, half men and half women, who fall under the CARA umbrella.
"The film ratings system is an independent system self-funded by submission fees," Graves said.
According to the classification and ratings rules, "It is not CARA's purpose to prescribe socially-appropriate values or to suggest any evolution of the values held by American parents, but instead to reflect the current values of the majority of American parents."
Here are some of their criteria:
G: Snippets of language that go beyond polite conversation, but are commonly used. G-rated movies have no nudity, sex or drugs.
PG: Some profanity and violence, brief nudity.
PG-13: Nudity that is not sexually oriented; violence that is not realistic and extreme. PG-13 is the minimum rating where drug use can be shows. Only one "harsher sexually-derived" word is allowed.
R: Hard language, sexually-oriented nudity and drug use
NC-17: Scenes that most parents would consider "patently too adult for their children 17 and under."
Movie producers and distributors can re-edit for different ratings. For example, "Dirty Dancing" was re-edited several times to drop from an R rating to a PG-13. Producers and distributors can also appeal the rating.
The PG-13 rating was added to the system in 1984. "Red Dawn" was the first PG-13 movie to be released.
"The system is built to evolve since it's administered by a board of parents reacting to the current parental outlooks, it's bound to change over the years," Graves said. "Not day-to-day, not even week-to-week, maybe even year-to-year, but certainly in decades it has."
