Wolverine 3 and X-Force to Aim for R-Rating Following Deadpool’s Success

Posted by on February 16th, 2016   Filed under: Action, Books/Comics, Industry News

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The dust has barely settled from Deadpool‘s record-breaking weekend at the box office and already people are busy prognosticating about the immediate effect that this will have in Hollywood. James Gunn took to Facebook to warn studio execs from assuming that the success of Deadpool is directly related to its rating or the fact that it breaks the fourth wall. Alas, it looks like he is already too late… the floodgates are open and we are about to get a whole lot of R-rated superhero movies. 20th Century Fox, in particular, seems to be doubling down on the idea, which I guess is to be expected considering that they need to make up for the failure of Fantastic Four. We are now hearing that the next Wolverine movie and a proposed X-Force movie will likely go for a hard R as well. Hit the jump for more details.

According to Collider, Deadpool producer Simon Kinberg recently had this to say about the possibility of more R-rated comic book movies at Fox:

“I think there are some stories that could be R-rated. I don’t know what they are, I mean I think the mainline X-Men movies have their own tone, which is a more operatic tone. It’s more dramatic, it is more PG-13 in a way. X-Force I could see being R-rated, and who knows?”

Following up on this, a post recently popped up on Reddit from a user who had attended Fox’s Toy Fair presentation, where it was stated that the anticipated rating for Wolverine III would be R. Now to be fair, the possibility of an R-rated Wolverine movie had been mentioned long before Deadpool hit theatres, but you can bet that this has made the studio much more confident in its commercial potential. Wolverine III will be directed by James Mangold and is expected to hit theatres on March 3rd, 2017. Are you looking forward to more R-rated superhero movies or is this trend going to get old fast?



  • Henrik

    I much prefer the R-rating, and it would be nice for Hugh Jackman to get to play r-rated wolverine before he bows out.

  • Derek97

    It’s hilarious that FOX, of all studios, is now embracing the R rating. Too bad their bozo PG-13 philosophies already killed Die Hard.

  • Anthony

    So basically the R-rating is the new “dark and gritty” for comic book films – one comic book film is made that happens to be dark and gritty (Batman Begins, and later Dark Knight), and everyone assumes correlation = causation, so then movies like Man of Steel and Watchmen come out, and those movies aren’t good, and people realize that they actually have to make a good movie and not just rely on an aesthetic style choice.
    Same thing with r-rated ones. It is only going to work if the source material itself is R-rated. I haven’t picked up many Xmen comic books but I would assume a lot of Wolverine’s stories fall into that awful no man’s land of “too much for PG-13, not enough for R”. So yeah, it sucks that they’d have to tone stuff down for a PG-13 rating in these films, but going the other extreme and going all out because “if it’ll be R-rated, let’s go to the extreme.” Again, that works for Deadpool, not sure if that’s the case for other characters.
    This is where the MPAA could benefit from a rating similar to Canada’s 14A that they’ve applied to films that were rated both R and PG-13 in the US.