Everything we've seen for Ridley Scott's Prometheus has been dark if not outright terrifying, and the film that inspired it, Scott's own Alien, is a landmark in R-rated mainstream entertainment. So though it's seemed safe to assume for a while now that Prometheus would get an R-rating, there are no guarantees when it comes to movies this big-- the hype for this movie is huge, and it would seemingly be very easy for Fox to cut out some violent moments, go for the hard-PG-13 rating that the Batman movies have defined, and make untold millions more in box office returns.
And yet, happily, Fox has confirmed that they're doing what looks like the right thing. Collider has gotten confirmation from the studio that Prometheus will be rated R "for sci-fi violence, including some intense images, and brief language." There's no mention of nudity, which means we may not see a follow-up to Sigourney Weaver's famous underwear scene at the beginning of Alien-- but if someone walks around in their underwear, you'll get the reference anyway.
This entire story started when an IMDB user posted a picture of their pre-purchase ticket stub that listed Prometheus as R, and it's actually pretty excellent of Fox not just to let the movie go forward with its R rating, but to confirm the news just when the Internet rumor mill got going. Recently famous for releasing blockbusters that seemed hugely compromised (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) or just plain bad (The Day The Earth Stood Still, etc.), Fox picked itself up last summer with two pretty great big movies in X-Men: First Class and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. OK, then they released In Time and The Sitter, so it's not all gravy, but with Prometheus so close on the horizon, we may be preparing to forgive them everything.
