This weekend, comic book adaptation Deadpool made twice as much as even the most optimistic box office analysts had predicted, with a huge $135m opening in the US and an estimated $156m over their four-day holiday weekend.
It's a storming success for a character who's little known outside comic fandom but hugely beloved inside it, thanks to his irrepressible humour and habit of breaking the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience.
Deadpool's triumph follows the blistering Mad Max: Fury Road last year, which took $376m worldwide, and Kingsman: The Secret Service, which made $414m. All three are R-rated – equivalent to a 15 or 18 rating here – so can we now please stop trying to force all big action movies into a PG-13 / 12A slot?
"I think the stunning success of Deadpool must have an impact," says box office expert Charles Gant. "The comic book/superhero space has begun to look very crowded indeed, and everyone had begun to wonder when the bubble will deflate.
"Fox, which has had rather mixed success with its films based on Marvel characters, took a big risk with Deadpool. The Kick-Ass movies are the only real precedents you can point to, and those films are relatively niche for the genre. Watchmen, rated 18 in the UK, was a commercial under-performer."
Acceptable in the '80s
Yet the R-rated action movie was once a regular staple at the box-office, and a defining genre of the 1980s. Think about The Terminator, Rambo, Die Hard: R-rated action films set the tone of the decade and launched their leads to superstar status.
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For a decade and a half, if you didn't have a brutal knife fight or copious and near-random machine gun fire, you might as well not show up to the A-list. Bulging muscles were not enough; you needed bloody knuckles too.
Then, with budgets climbing, producers started chasing the more family-friendly PG-13 / 12A bracket, with the conventional wisdom suggesting that you could reach a bigger audience and bigger box office. That's sometimes true: no R-rated film has ever broken the $1bn barrier, and in fact on the all-time, wordwide box-office chart the highest R-rated entry is The Passion Of The Christ at #104 (not adjusted for inflation).
But on the other hand, there aren't many pure action films on that list anyway, nor are there many sarcastic, outrageous heroes like Deadpool – so why not let those guys cater to their own demographic?
Rules are rules
Within the confines of a PG-13 rating, there are hard limits. You can use the F-bomb, but only once. You can behead someone but it's likely to be non-graphic and there will, surprisingly to medical students, be little or no blood. Bad guys will still die by the score, but their entrails stay on the inside. Basically, anyone still after blood and boobs will have to turn to Game Of Thrones and the other cable shows that portray violence a little more realistically.
The problem is that those limits often chafe. Films like Live Free Or Die Hard and The Expendables 3 lose something when they limit themselves to a PG-13. They constrain characters who are meant to be outrageous, and limit action that is supposed to be visceral. When Bruce Willis' John McClane can't even complete his trademark, "Yippee-ki-yay…" catchphrase without being interrupted by a loud noise on the soundtrack, something is seriously out of whack.
That's why the success of Deadpool is such good news. A solid R-rated effort, it has buckets of blood, some really gross-out viscera (Deadpool cuts off his own hand, for reasons that are totally sensible and not at all petulant) and even some sex scenes. Yet it made more money in its opening weekend in the US than any other X-Men movie, and more than 2013's The Wolverine made in its entire run.
In light of that it's tempting to imagine that The Wolverine, based on one of comic's tougher characters in one of his grittiest stories, might have played better with an R rating. Just picture that CG-heavy finale replaced by a bloody, brutal fight to the death, and you could easily add another $100m to the worldwide gross.
So will we see more R-rated action?
Of course, not all action movies should be R-rated – but what Deadpool and Kingsmen and Mad Max demonstrate is that you can have a huge hit despite the higher rating.
"I don't see Disney being deflected from its current strategy, as that company has a strong family-friendly brand," says Gant. "Nor do I see Sony going there with Spider-Man. The most likely outcome is for Fox to further explore the space with another character from the X-Men universe, assuming there is a suitable one. If there are other properties that lend themselves to this kind of R-rated treatment, the Deadpool result will certainly embolden others."
By leaning in to a character's particular appeal (in this case, he's super violent and completely uncensored) instead of trying to water him down to nothing, you actually make him more interesting to the public and get more bums on seats. That's good news for other more grown-up comic characters like Wolverine, like Dredd and like Apollo and the Midnighter.
It's also good news for the action genre in general. So in future, let's allow The Expendables to cut people's heads off with the swipe of a knife, Rambo-style. Let's allow John McClane to call people a motherf**ker. And let's allow Deadpool to fly his freak flag high. 12-year-olds already get to play with action figures without judgment. They shouldn't get all the good stuff.
