The ‘Hobbit’ Extended Editions May be Rated R For Some Reason
All of Peter Jackson’s Middle-Earth movies have pushed the boundaries of the PG-13 rating, but it looks like the extended edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies may be the Halfling that breaks the Oliphaunt’s back. It seems that the longer version of the trilogy capper, which is returning to theaters this October, has been slapped with an R-rating by the MPAA.
According to Rope of Silicon, the longer (how could it actually be longer?) cut of The Battle of the Five Armies has been rated R for “some violence.” That’s a strange rating because the movie itself is pretty much two and a half hours of non-stop beheading and chopping and slashing and stabbing. “Some” doesn’t do it justice.
Before he rose to the top of the Hollywood A-list with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson made a name for himself making grisly and giddily grotesque genre movies like Braindead. These genre roots are evident in all of his mainstream movies, where characters are stomped, torn apart, sliced in half, and die all kinds of violent deaths. If the victims of the worst violence in the Hobbit movies were humans and not Orcs and Goblins, they would be rated R instantly. No question.
So now we have to wonder: What the hell did Jackson add back into The Battle of the Five Armies that finally pushed things over the top? For all we know, this is part of a grander plan. We had little interest in revisiting this movie (especially in a longer form!), but now that it’s been re-rated, we can’t help but be a little curious. Is this how Jackson sucks us back in? By promising the most hardcore Middle-Earth movie yet? Maybe.