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The Wolverine 3 set for R-rating, and it's all thanks to Deadpool

Now, just sit back and watch as every greenlit superhero project suddenly becomes R-rated

Clarisse Loughrey
Wednesday 17 February 2016 06:24 EST
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Here we go. After Deadpool's incredible box office success, Hollywood's got a new favourite obsession: the R-rated superhero flick.

Reddit user RayChaos posted an image taken from a promotional booklet at 20th Century Fox's Toy Fair 2016, which sees The Wolverine 3 anticipating an R rating.

Though such fortuitous timing in this revelation, a mere week after Deadpool's success, certainly suggests an opportunistic move on Fox's part; though it's a move that will certainly have been long debated within the studio, especially since The Wolverine was originally edited down from an R to a PG-13 for cinemas, with the R-cut later making its way to home release.


During a post-screening Q&A (via Collider), X-Men and Deadpool's producer Simon Kinberg admitted Fox were indeed looking at the R-rating in a whole new light; no longer as the grounds for left field risks, but as the force behind further iterations of the X-Men universe.

"I think there are some stories that could be R-rated. I don’t know what they are, I mean I think the mainline X-Men movies have their own tone, which is a more operatic tone," he stated. "It’s more dramatic, it is more PG-13 in a way. X-Force I could see being R-rated, and who knows?"

And though Kinberg's comments clearly come under the category of speculatory, it wouldn't be entirely foolish to put a level of faith in his words. The X-Force film, essentially, would look to fuse characters from both Deadpool and the mainline X-Men universe; potentially bringing together the likes of Deadpool, Wolverine, Colossus, Psylocke, Cyclops, Archangel, Cable, and Wolverine. It would certainly be more than a little bizarre to see Deadpool's character censored so he could neatly fit into a PG-13 mould, while still maintaining all his foul-mouthed glory in any further solo films.

Deadpool is out now.

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