PG-13 'King's Speech' Arrives on April Fool's Day
Best Family Film of 2011?
A press release arrived in my inbox earlier today with the following headline "Oscar's Best Picture is Now the Best Family Film of 2011 as The Weinstein Company's The King's Speech PG-13 Opens Nationwide on April 1st". Yeah, it's a mouthful and it also came with this following quote from Weinstein's President of Theatrical Distribution and Home Entertainment Eric Lomis:
"We are thankful to the MPAA for their wisdom and swift action in approving the release of The King's Speech PG-13 release. The action enables those to whom it speaks most directly – young people who are troubled by stuttering, bullying and similar trials — to see it."
Yup, it's all smiles at The Weinstein Co. as their Best Picture winner will attempt to secure a whole new audience… But will it work and does this really make it the "Best Family Film of 2011"?
I have included the one offensive scene in the film that earned The King's Speech an R rating directly above. It's not safe for work considering the abundance of uses of the word "fuck" and according to Deadline the film was able to earn its new PG-13 rating by replacing "fuck" with "shit".
It was originally assumed the offending word would simply be muted out, but after two instances of the film being rated by the MPAA it would seem like they went back and reconsidered this strategy and instead changed the dialogue.
The R-rated version of The King's Speech will be removed from theaters entirely and on April 1 the PG-13 rated version will hit 1,000 theaters across the nation. Following that the DVD and Blu-ray will be released on April 19.
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Really award season is over, i doubt anyone cares about his movies anymore.
Given how much time has passed since they got the PG-13 I thought maybe they'd thought better of it given all the backlash. Maybe they just waited until the R version fell out of the top ten to put out the new version. Regardless, I don't see it having any effect on the film's box office whatsoever, even if they take out a bunch of "family friendly film" advertisements on TV. It all amounts to just another victory for censorship and the fact that they replaced "fuck" with "shit" just shows how idiotic the whole rating system is, not that we didn't know this already. You can have as much profanity (not to mention bloodless violence and a certain amount of sex without nudity or thrusting) as you want and still get a PG-13 as long as you don't say "fuck" more than twice. But if you say "fuck" three times, even if there's no additional objectionable content in the film WHATSOEVER, you get an R. The MPAA is nothing more than a group of old men being allowed to impose their personal morals on the ENTIRE COUNTRY. I'll just call it what it is (more to fly in the face of the MPAA than anything else): it's fucking bullshit.
Pass.
First off, this movie is way overrated.
Second.
This is like watching the movie on TV just w/o commercials. Also you're paying $10 to see it.
Big time Pass.
are they gonna release the rated r version on bluray?
The word sh– is family friendly? What about those families that find that word offensive? They should have just bleeped out all the bad words and re-released it "G". Duh.
I've already seen the film in it's original content form and enjoyed it fine.
This is a redundant change at this point in the film's journey. The box-office has been earned, everyone who wants to see it has already done so (it's not really likely to be a film that US teenagers will go raving about and it never was, rather more skewing towards an older audience who UNDERSTOOD why the word 'fuck' was used, unlike the MPAA – by the way MPAA how come it's ok for The Social Network to have a guy snort coke off a girl's stomach and that's PG-13 content?) this isn't going to make a huge difference now.
Hope this is an April Fool's Day hoax.