SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains MASSIVE spoilers for Sausage Party. If you haven't seen the movie yet, please do yourself a favor and click away to another one of our wonderful articles!
While the fact that it's an animated feature may make it seem somewhat innocent, Sausage Party is an absolutely filthy comedy, and right now stands to be called the raunchiest movie of 2016. Watching it, you actually can't help but wonder exactly how the MPAA let it go to theaters with just an R-rating. As it turns out, this is a feeling that is shared by writer/producer/star Seth Rogen as well, as he was shocked to learn that one of the only things the film needed to cut, according to the ratings board, were some pubic hairs on the testicles of a piece of pita bread.
Rogen was recently a guest on The Howard Stern Show to promote the Friday release of Sausage Party, and one portion of the interview was dedicated to the star talking about the process dealing with the MPAA when he and the rest of the film's main players were trying to finish the theatrical cut. Rogen noted that part of making the movie was seeing just how far they could push the line in terms of raunchy content, and they did get an NC-17 when they first submitted a version to the MPAA, but he was ultimately shocked by just how little the ratings board ultimately wanted to be removed from the film. Specifically talking about one of the last sequences of the movie, which features an all-out food orgy in the grocery store, Rogen explained,
We probably added six things into the orgy that we were like, 'These are our sacrificial lambs. They're the chips we're willing to lose.' And we lost like an eighth of one of them. [laughs]... There is a pita bread, and you see his ball sack in the end orgy. And it had hair on it. And they asked we remove the hair from the pita bread's ball sack. ... So we digitally shaved the pita bread's ball sack and removed the hair from it.
Those of you who are familiar with the regular activities of the MPAA will probably understand why this is such a big head-scratcher. As an organization, the ratings board is notorious for being lenient when it comes to violence (hence why The Expendables 3 managed to be released with a PG-13), but normally any kind of sexuality makes them go haywire - sometimes forcing filmmakers to make cuts they definitely don't want to make. So why was that not the case with Sausage Party? Your guess is as good as ours. Maybe the orgy is okay because its sexually-explicit food instead of people? That seems pretty stupid, but this is the MPAA that we're talking about.
You can watch Seth Rogen talk about his experience working with the MPAA on Sausage Party in the video below:
It's all pretty ridiculous right? If an adult is mature enough to watch animated food have a full-blown orgy on the big screen, you'd think they'd be able to deal with some pubic hair on the scrotum of a piece of pita bread - but the MPAA has never exactly been an organization driven by logic or reason. You'll be able to see for yourself if they made the right choice very soon, as Sausage Party arrives in theaters this Friday, August 12th.
