Surprise, surprise… the MPAA has made yet another questionable judgment call that has a lot of movie fans up in arms. Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has been riding a wave of buzz coming out of the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals (having won the People’s Choice Award in Toronto, no less), and Fox Searchlight decided to move up the release date for the film to November 14th in order to get it out to audiences as soon as possible. This week, however, that plan was complicated by an MPAA decision to give the movie an R-rating for “violence, disturbing images and language”.

The weird thing is that Fox Searchlight is apparently not going to appeal the decision. A lot of people have been pointing out the discrepancy between this movie and The Dark Knight, which only received a PG-13 rating despite its dark and disturbing imagery. I guess they might claim that The Dark Knight takes place in a fantasy / comic book world, whereas Slumdog Millionaire does not (although a more likely reason is just that Warner Brothers simply had a lot of money behind The Dark Knight). There are some scenes of violence and torture in Slumdog Millionaire, but it’s not very graphic. In fact, one of the few things that bothered me a little bit about the movie is that Danny Boyle seemed to want to go for both a gritty City of God feel and a fairy tale feel at the same time. It ends up somewhere in the middle. The movie was probably only going to get a limited release in the first place, so that may be why Fox Searchlight isn’t fighting this, but it is definitely unfortunate because I think teenage audiences would enjoy it just as much. (I am guessing here in Canada it will probably be rated 14A.) Check out a clip from Slumdog Millionaire below.