Venom: Let There Be Carnage is officially rated PG-13

Sony is almost ready to drop Venom: Let There Be Carnage into theaters, hopeful for another windfall after the surprise success of the first Venom movie in 2018. Tom Hardy returns as Eddie Brock, a journalist who has the bad luck to bond with an alien parasite that just so happens to have an insatiable appetite for human flesh. By the end of the first movie, Eddie and his alien hanger-on have come to something of an understanding, but still, living with roommates can be hard.

Let There Be Carnage brings jailed serial killer Cletus Cassidy (Woody Harrelson) into the mix; he also gets possessed by an alien symbiote, and has way fewer reservations about protecting human life than Brock.

The premise seems to set the movie up as a violent bloodbath not suitable for kids, but the MPAA has revealed that it has rated the movie PG-13 “for intense sequences of violence and action, some strong language, disturbing material and suggestive references.” The last Venom movie was also rated PG-13 “for intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language.”

The advent of R-rated superhero movies

Once upon a time, it was conventional wisdom that R-rated superhero movies were hard sells at the box office, and plenty of studios still take care to keep their movies at least somewhat family-friendly — there are no R-rated movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance.

Others have been more adventurous. 20th Century Fox scored hits with Logan and the Deadpool movies, and Warner Bros. has released R-rated films like Birds of Prey. Then again, the first Venom made more money than all of those, so it’s not like Sony has no idea what it’s doing.

At the end of the day, if Let There Be Carnage pleases audiences as much as the first movie, everybody will win, regardless of how many creative curse words Venom drops.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage comes out in theaters on October 15.

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