Credit: ABCDwayne Johnson has been on the marketing trail for quite some time promoting his newest movie, Black Adam.
Black Adam, which was released this November, has grossed $163.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $214.9 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $378.1 million. The DC Universe film features the anti-hero, Black Adam, played by Dwayne Johnson, as well as Sarah Shahi (Iris), Pierce Brosnas (Doctor Fate), Noah Centineo (Atom Smasher), Quintessa Swindell (Cyclone), and Aldis Hodge (Hawkman).
But, what if we told you that this PG-13-rated film was toeing the line of being rated R?
As a matter of fact, a recent report indicates that Black Adam had to be censored to keep its PG-13 rating.
Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Nikos Kalaitzidis and digital effects supervisor Greg Teegarden recently discussed a scene from the film that had to be cut to avoid being given an R-rating.
“They had a prosthetic arm on set. They must have dropped it 20 or 30 times, and it just always looked like a dummy arm. And so we decided, ‘You know what, we can fix this.’ We already had the merc asset. It wasn’t a big deal to just tear an arm off and just line it up where he was connected to the shoulder and add some ‘tasteful’ gore to it. Then that way when it dropped on the ground, we had complete control over it and it didn’t look like a piece of rubber hitting the ground.”
At one point, the creators had an idea for a disembodied hand to have a bit of a twitch after being dismembered.
“So, we’re sitting in dailies one day and I said to Nikos, ‘It’d be really funny if, when it hit the ground, it felt like he had a little bit of a last little twitch in his finger.’ Arda, our anim sup, he’s like, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ So he does that and we’re all like, ‘That looks great.’ So we showed it to Bill Westenhofer, who showed it to Jaume, everybody loved it. It was in the movie and then it got MPAA’ed.”
Black Adam is rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, intense action, and some language which means some content may not be suitable for kids under age 13.
Dwayne The Johnson, who got his full-length feature film beginning in Universal Pictures’ The Mummy Returns (2001) and the subsequent spinoff The Scorpion King (2002) after a successful career as a professional wrestler in the WWE, has become a household name.
The Rock paid tribute to his father Rocky Johnson, who was also a professional wrestler, in an episode of That 70’s Show and got his first big break in the Universal Pictures blockbuster The Mummy Returns (2001). He would go on to star in The Scorpion King (2002) and just like that, his career in Hollywood had taken off.
Johnson is now one of the most popular actors in Hollywood and has starred in countless blockbusters, including films like Gridiron Gang (2006), Get Smart (2008), the Fast and the Furious franchise, The Gameplan (2007), Race to Witch Mountain (2009), San Andreas (2015), Bay Watch(2017), Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle (2017) and Central Intelligence (2016), Rampage (2018) alongside friend Kevin Hart. Most recently, he starred in Disney’s Jungle Cruise (2021), and Netflix’s Red Notice (2021), as well as his new NBC sitcom Young Rock. The Rock also just lent his voice to the movie DC League of Super-Pets, which was released earlier this year.
What do you think of this censorship of Dwayne Johnson’s movie? Let us know in the comments.