A few weeks ago, we reported that Warner Bros is gunning for Birds of Prey and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad to receive an R-rating. This of course, comes at the heels of Todd Phillip’s Joker‘s massive critical and financial success. This has now been confirmed. The official MPAA rating for Birds of Prey is in and it’s rated R (rated-18 in Malaysian terminology). The film earned that rating due to “strong violence and language throughout, and some sexual and drug material.”
This is great news as it looks like Margot Robbie, who’s the lead actor and producer of Birds of Prey, previously told SlashFilm that when she pitched the film, she had an R-rating in mind.
A lot of the characters that exist in the DC world, to be honest, are quite dark. And a lot of them, Huntress for example, have serious childhood trauma, have serious mental illnesses like Harley. But I felt like sometimes you can’t really go as deep with those things if you have to censor yourself. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be liberating if we didn’t have to worry about that?’ and really go for it, and then later in the edit kind of find where the tone of movie lies.
I pitched the idea of an R-rated girl gang film including Harley, because I was like, ‘Harley needs friends. Harley loves interacting with people, so don’t ever make her do a standalone film. She’s got to be with other people, it should be a girl gang. I wasn’t seeing enough girl gangs on screen, especially in the action space. So that was always a big part of it.
Birds of Prey is directed by Cathy Yan and stars Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, alongside Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary and Ewan McGregor as Black Mask.
The film is set hit theatres February 2020.
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