MAN OF STEEL Fails To Win The NC-17 We Were Hoping For

Zack Snyder's Man of Steel finally got its rating, and as everyone save for the most oblivious among us might have guessed, it's a PG-13. It specifically earned that rating for "“intense sequences of sci-fi violence, action and destruction, and for some language." Also, it's a comic book movie, dummy.

That PG-13 explanation bodes far better than the one they stuck on Bryan Singer's Superman Returns, which boasted only, "Some intense action violence." Or, as I remember it, "A little knucklehead smashes a guy with a piano."

Actually, looking at old articles regarding Superman Returns' PG-13 rating, I found some who complained that a Superman movie was not PG. I suppose that is another way to look the rating, albeit one I hardly think matters. The distinction between a PG and a PG-13 seems almost meaningless. It it's animated: PG. If it's a comic book movie: PG-13. Other than that, I'm not sure how you can tell unless you have Wolverine telling people to go fuck themselves.

So perhaps some will lament the further loss of Superman's innocence, while others lament the ongoing nonexistence of Superman's balls. The rest of us can just accept the natural order of things and go back to lamenting the failure of The Last Stand at the box office. No, I'm not letting it go.