We love a good anti-MPAA story here on Cinema Blend, and right now there’s one going around. Apparently Max Payne director John Moore is pissed off at the ratings board, and has accused them of sucking Warner Bros’ cock. No really, that’s an actual quote from his interview with a site called Dasgamer.
But to me, the interesting thing about this story isn’t that the MPAA sucks, but that Max Payne may be butchered in order to get in under the PG-13 wire. Moore is pissed at the MPAA, but maybe he should be pissed at 20th Century Fox, for forcing him to transform a game which is rated “Mature” and is intended only for adult audiences into a big-budget movie franchise for teenagers and tweeners.
The thing is, Moore was contracted by Fox to bring in the movie with a PG-13. The movie he made though is getting an R-rating from the MPPA, he says unfairly, but whatever. If you’ve seen the really cool trailers for the film, then you’re probably expecting an R-rating. It just looks like it’s supposed to be that kind of film, and the tantalizing possibility of videogame movie being treated as adult content is a big part of why those trailers look so freakishly good.
Unfortunately, Fox is forcing Moore to get this thing squeezed into a PG-13, which means he’s now in the process of making massive cuts to the finished film in order to deliver something 13-year-olds can see. The way Moore talks about it, he’s definitely unhappy with the changes he’s being forced to make, and that almost always means very bad things for the movie in question.
Sure, the MPAA’s standards are completely unfair and the organization may or may not in fact be run by homophobic religious zealots, but Fox could solve the problem by letting Moore release the movie he actually made, just with an R. R-rated movies do make a lot of money you know, it’s not like the thing’s getting an NC-17. Of course this is 20th Century Fox we’re talking about, the company that screwed over Mike Judge, ruined X-Men, and is currently in the process of destroying Watchmen. Moore is stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one, and it may be Max Payne that suffers.
