Who Decides Movie Ratings?

It's Sunday, June fourteenth. I saw Disclosure Day over the weekend, which was rated PG-13, and while I was watching it I started thinking about something I've never really questioned before: who decides what gets rated PG-13 versus R? Like, who are these people? Where do they work? What are the actual rules? There are no published rules. The ratings are decided by a secret panel of anonymous parents in Los Angeles with no formal training in child psychology, media studies, or anything else you'd expect would qualify you to decide what two hundred million Americans are allowed to see at the movies. The system was invented in 1968, expanded in 1984 because Steven Spielberg personally called the head of the ratings board and asked for a new category, and it shapes every major film that gets made today because the difference between PG-13 and R can be worth a hundred million dollars at the box office. Before this system existed, there was something worse: an actual censorship code that banned interracial romance, required married couples to sleep in separate beds, and prohibited showing a criminal "winning" at the end of a story. The history of how America decides what you can watch is stranger than most of the movies it rates. Before there were ratings, there was censorship, and it was thorough.

From 1934 to 1968, every major Hollywood film was subject to the Hays Code, a set of rules enforced by the Motion Picture Production Code Administration. The code was named after Will Hays, the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and it dictated in specific detail what could and couldn't appear on screen. No profanity, including the words "hell" and "damn." No depiction of interracial relationships, which they called "miscegenation" and listed as a hard ban. No nudity, even in silhouette. No showing a crime in a way that might make the audience sympathize with the criminal. Married couples had to be shown sleeping in separate beds. Kisses couldn't last longer than three seconds. If a character did something immoral, they had to be punished for it by the end of the film. Virtue had to win. Sin had to lose. Every time.

Studios didn't just follow suggestions. They submitted scripts for approval before filming started. Scenes were cut, rewritten, and re-shot to satisfy the code administrators. For over thirty years, a private organization with no legal authority effectively controlled the content of American cinema. The reason they could do this is that movies weren't protected by the First Amendment until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled in a case called Burstyn v. Wilson (BURST-in) that films were a form of expression entitled to constitutional protection. Even after that ruling, the Hays Code continued by inertia for another sixteen years, because studios were afraid that without the code, government censorship would replace it.

By the late 1960s, the code was unenforceable. Films like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bonnie and Clyde were pushing boundaries that the code couldn't contain, and audiences were showing up in record numbers to see them. In 1968, Jack Valenti (vah-LEN-tee), the new head of the MPAA, replaced the Hays Code with a voluntary rating system: G for general audiences, M for mature (later changed to PG), R for restricted, and X for adults only. The transition was immediate and dramatic. In 1968, the G-rated Oliver! won Best Picture at the Oscars. The very next year, Midnight Cowboy won. It was rated X. The rating system worked for sixteen years with a problem that kept getting harder to ignore: the gap between PG and R was enormous. A PG film could be Bambi or it could be Jaws, which Universal successfully lobbied to keep out of the R category in 1975 because an R rating would have killed the teenage audience. A PG label covered everything from animated fairy tales to a movie where a man gets eaten alive by a shark. All it said was "parental guidance suggested," which could mean almost anything.

In the summer of 1984, Steven Spielberg directed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and produced Gremlins, and both received PG ratings. Temple of Doom showed a man's heart being ripped from his chest while he was still alive. Gremlins featured creatures being microwaved and blended. Parents who had brought their seven-year-olds expecting a PG adventure were horrified.

Spielberg agreed with them. "I created the problem and I also supplied the solution," he said later. "I invented the rating." He called his friend Jack Valenti and suggested creating something between PG and R. Valenti agreed. On July 1, 1984, the PG-13 rating was established, with the advisory that parents were "strongly cautioned to give special guidance for attendance of children under 13." The first film released with the rating was Red Dawn, a Patrick Swayze (SWAY-zee) war movie, in August 1984. PG-13 quickly became the most commercially important rating in the industry, because it let studios include mature content, violence, some language, mild sexuality, without losing the under-seventeen audience that an R rating would restrict. The ratings are assigned by a group called the Classification and Rating Administration, which operates under the MPA (formerly the MPAA). The board consists of anonymous parents who live in the Los Angeles area and have children between the ages of five and fifteen. Their identities are not publicly disclosed. There are no published criteria for what separates one rating from another. The decisions are subjective, based on what the board members collectively feel is appropriate for different age groups.

There are informal guidelines that have emerged over the decades, but none of them are written in any official document. The general understanding is that one use of the F-word in a non-sexual context gets PG-13. Use it sexually, or use it more than once, and you're likely looking at R. But this isn't a law. It's a pattern. Films like Dunkirk and Brooklyn had multiple uses of the word and kept their PG-13 ratings. The board can override its own conventions whenever it decides to.

The inconsistency that gets the most criticism is the violence-versus-sex double standard. A PG-13 film can show extensive, graphic violence: gunfights, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, mass destruction. A 2013 study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that PG-13 films now contain more gun violence than R-rated films. More. The rating that was created to protect thirteen-year-olds from content like Temple of Doom now permits more shooting than the rating that's supposed to be for adults. Meanwhile, a brief scene of nudity or a single depiction of sexuality will almost always push a film to R. American ratings essentially tell young people that watching someone get shot is less objectionable than seeing a naked body. In most of Europe, the standard is reversed: nudity is treated casually, violence is restricted more heavily. The difference is cultural, not scientific, and it shapes what filmmakers around the world are willing to put on screen depending on which market they're targeting. The reason any of this matters beyond parental guidance is that ratings directly determine how much money a film makes, which means they directly determine what kinds of films get made.

R-rated films earn roughly half of what PG-13 films earn at the box office, on average. An R rating means nobody under seventeen can buy a ticket without a parent, which eliminates a massive chunk of the moviegoing audience. Studios know this, and they actively shape their films to avoid R. Directors cut scenes. Writers change dialogue. Editors soften violence and remove nudity. The rating system doesn't just classify content after it's made. It shapes the content before a single frame is shot, because the studio knows what rating they need to hit for the film to be commercially viable.

The result is a system where PG-13 dominates the box office but R dominates the awards. Over sixty percent of Best Picture winners since the rating system began have been R-rated. The Godfather, Schindler's List, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, everything Everywhere All at Once. The Academy rewards films that take risks with content that the box office punishes. A director who wants to make a commercially successful film targets PG-13. A director who wants to make an artistically ambitious film often needs R. The rating system forces a choice between reach and depth, and most studios choose reach.

This tension is why PG-13 has become, as Spielberg himself described it, "hot sauce" for a movie. It signals to the audience that the film has some edge, that it's not a children's movie, but it's still accessible to teenagers, which is the demographic that drives opening weekends. The sweet spot between too safe and too restricted is worth billions of dollars a year, and the people who determine where that line falls are a dozen anonymous parents in LA making subjective judgments with no published criteria. The most commercially consequential decisions in the film industry are made by people whose names you will never know, using rules that don't officially exist. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Before movie ratings existed, there was the Hays Code, which was straight-up censorship for thirty four years: no profanity, no interracial romance, married couples in separate beds, criminals had to lose. The rating system replaced it in 1968. PG-13 was invented in 1984 because Spielberg made Temple of Doom and Gremlins too intense for PG and called the head of the MPAA to suggest a new category. Today, the ratings are assigned by a secret panel of anonymous parents in Los Angeles with no published rules. The informal guideline for the F-word is one use in a non-sexual context for PG-13, but even that isn't consistent. PG-13 films now contain more gun violence than R-rated films, but a brief scene of nudity pushes you to R. The business impact is massive: an R rating can cut your box office in half, so studios actively edit films to hit PG-13, which means the rating system shapes what gets made before cameras even roll. Over sixty percent of Best Picture winners have been R-rated. The box office rewards accessibility. The Oscars reward risk. And the people who draw the line between the two are a dozen parents you've never heard of, making decisions by feel.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.