The first true horror hit and maybe the first good horror movie overall this year, arrived in theaters with last weekend’s The Invisible Man. But horror fans under a certain age couldn’t partake in Leigh Whannell’s monster movie without an accompanying parent or adult guardian because that film was rated R. That will not be the case with this month’s A Quiet Place Part II, which nabbed the more inclusive PG-13 rating. Here’s why A Quiet Place Part II is rated PG-13:
Rated PG-13 for terror, violence and bloody/disturbing images
Yup, that pretty much covers all the bases I would expect or want from a horror movie. And lest anyone worry that A Quiet Place Part II isn’t rated R, it’s important to remember that neither was its predecessor. A Quiet Place was also rated PG-13 and it still managed to be a critical and commercial smash, further proving that even horror movies don’t have to be R-rated, they just have to be scary. So this rating was expected.
On the scary front, A Quiet Place Part II seems poised to deliver again. The Classification and Ratings Administration’s site Filmratings.com explained that A Quiet Place 2 received its PG-13 for terror, violence and bloody/disturbing images. The first movie was incredibly tense and things look to get even scarier as the Abbott family leaves the relative safety of their homestead and ventures out into the world.
For comparison, although the original A Quiet Place also received a PG-13 rating, there are some differences in the reasoning behind the rating for the two films. A Quiet Place was given a PG-13 for terror and bloody images, so the two outliers and new bits here for the sequel are the violence and disturbing images.
For the latter part, I’m not sure what would earn A Quiet Place Part II the ‘disturbing’ descriptor that it’s predecessor did not have, because watching a foot go into a nail was pretty damn disturbing. That always gets into a question of how exactly are these things measured and quantified to determine one film has enough disturbing images to warrant that description where another does not.
More interesting though is the violence part. A Quiet Place definitely had violence in it going by the definition of the word, but the violence apparently warranted special consideration here. If I had to guess, that is because, as we’ve seen from the trailers, A Quiet Place: Part II will see the Abbotts meeting other people, who may not be worth saving.
So I think we can expect some human on human violence in this film. It probably won’t be tame either. Despite the PG-13 rating, nothing we’ve seen from A Quiet Place: Part II indicates that it is holding back and as this rating shows, there will be blood.
Just don’t expect a lot of cursing. On the one hand, if any situation calls for an F-bomb or two, it’s the one the characters in A Quiet Place are living in. But on the other hand, shouting ‘fuck’ is not conducive to staying alive in such an environment, quite the opposite in fact. So any F-bombs are ultimately unnecessary.
A Quiet Place Part II will have the benefit of this box office-friendly PG-13 rating when it opens in a couple of weeks. John Krasinski’s sequel is tracking to make $55 million opening weekend, but as always, that number could go higher or lower once opening weekend hits.
A Quiet Place: Part II opens on March 20. Check out our 2020 Release Schedule to see what else is headed to theaters this year and stay tuned to CinemaBlend for the latest movie news.
