Justice League Dark: Jay Olivia Talks R-rating

Justice League Dark is the second DC animated film to get an “R” rating

A fee months ago, the animated adaptation of The Killing Joke made history by being the first DC animated film to ever get an R rating. Justice League Dark will be the second DC animated film to get such a rating. It makes sense as the subject matter can get pretty dark and gruesome.

However, Justice League Dark director Jay Olivia explains that the R rating wasn’t what they were originally aiming for with the film, and had he known, he would’ve probably pushed the adult content of the film more:

"If I knew that I could get away with a rated R, I would have made it a hard R. When we make these films, our goal is always a PG-13, so there’s certain things that we know we can get away with and things that we can’t; we can’t do beheadings and we can’t do arterial blood spray or anything like that. I’m just trying to tell the best story that I can, and from there we edit some things out, or we try to hide things. Instead of showing a beheading, we’ll cut to the shadow on the wall as you see the beheading in the shadow, but you don’t actually see it. The Killing Joke was kind of a godsend in the sense of, because of its success and because Home Video took a chance of releasing it as an R, it paved the way for this to be an R."

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See this worries me a little, you shouldn’t go for a hard R just because you can. It should serve the story. There’s certainly an argument that the material in Justice League Dark can be best served with an “R” rating, but that doesn’t sound like the argument Jay Olivia is making. Let’s hope I’m wrong, but The Killing Joke barely seemed like an R movie, and it was pretty awful, so the rating didn’t do it any favors. Justice League Dark is out January 24th on Digital HD and February 7th on Blu-Ray.

h/t Empire