Could Deadpool & Wolverine have hit No.1 without an underage audience?

America’s entertainment industry trades are splattered with headlines all screaming the same sentiment: ‘Deadpool & Wolverine obliterates R-rated record’.

Which is to say, this gigantic superhero movie, starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, with a rating usually associated with movies patronised by gentlemen in black raincoats, has somehow become the biggest thing in Hollywood.

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman in Deadpool & Wolverine.Credit: 20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios

Like most film industry accounting, however, the devil is in the detail. Which is not to say Deadpool & Wolverine is not a hit. It’s a monstrously gargantuan one, having pulled in a quarter of a billion dollars in days and likely to keep going like a money-earing tornado.

The devilish detail lies in exactly what makes a movie R-rated, and who can see it.

“Disney probably doesn’t want me to frame it this way, but I’ve always thought of Deadpool & Wolverine as the first four-quadrant, R-rated film,” one of its stars, actor Ryan Reynolds, said on Sunday.

“Yes, it’s rated R, but we set out to make a movie with enough laughs, action and heart to appeal to everyone, whether you’re a comic book movie fan or not.”

Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have a hit on their hands with Deadpool & Wolverine.Credit: Getty

“Four-quadrant” is one of those deliciously sensible Hollywood phrases which refers to the four key audience demographics: men and women, and the under-25 and over-25 segment of each. Make a movie that captures all four, and you have a four-quadrant film.

So, first, a bit of housekeeping: Deadpool & Wolverine is not actually an R-rated movie in Australia. The classification here is MA15+, which is a whole other thing - we will get into that in a moment.

America’s R and Australia’s MA15+ conjure mental images of something forbidden that is still somehow tapping the mainstream when the reality of going to the movies is oftentimes far more ordinary.

In America, an R-rated movie requires anyone under 17 to attend with an accompanying parent or adult guardian. But here’s the fine print: it’s not the law, it’s just the recommendation of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and it’s a voluntary scheme which covers roughly 80 per cent of US cinemas.

Ryan Reynolds, the star, producer and now co-writer of the Deadpool franchise.Credit: AP

That means there are cinemas which do not enforce the code, and others that display it but have no obligation to adhere to it. Moreover, it is unclear how a law enforcement agency could even respond to an underage patron, given the voluntary code does not have the law behind it.

In Australia, the marginally more specific but slightly more generous MA15+ rating means that Deadpool & Wolverine is legally restricted to people aged 15 and over. This means they may - note the word may - be asked to show proof of age, but also that under 15s must - note the word must - be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian for the duration of the film.

The key difference is that Australia’s classifications are enshrined in the law; they are broadly and more rigidly enforced than their American counterparts.

But Australia’s classifications are also a tad more generous: we have made a determination that Deadpool & Wolverine is “strong in impact” but not quite “high in impact”, otherwise it might have scored a much more restrictive R18+.

So far, after just a few days, Deadpool & Wolverine has pulled around US$205 million ($313 million) in the US market, and US$438.3 million worldwide. By anyone’s calculations, it’s going to make a record-breaking, accountant-snapping pile of money.

That devilish detail we talked about? More than 10 per cent of the audience is estimated to be under 17, which is more than twice the percentage of most R-rated films. That means the kids have their foot in the door, and more are coming.

In terms of the whole budgetary ballet, Deadpool & Wolverine dances a very delicate dance. As a superhero film, it’s a relatively safe pitch, though in a business dominated by Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Thor, Deadpool would - if he was written to fit a more generously child-friendly demographic - not likely deliver the same kind of numbers.

As a billion-dollar franchise, Deadpool needs to keep things racy or the numbers don’t add up. The film’s director Shawn Levy instead has to balance all the ingredients of the R-rated recipe - adult themes, profane language, intense or persistent violence and sexually oriented nudity - while also supercharging the film with action set pieces, humour and sharp writing.

And it’s the last two, in particular, that have helped push Deadpool & Wolverine out of the R-rated shadows and into the mainstream.

The first Deadpool film, released in 2016, pulled in about US$783 million off a US$58 million budget. The second, Deadpool 2 (2018), cost around US$110 and pulled in about the same, US$786 million. For the uninitiated, a film costs roughly its budget over again to market and distribute, so very loose studio maths would say it has to roughly pull in double its budget to go into profit.

Deadpool & Wolverine will likely blow all of that to pieces. It has a budget of US$200 million - inflation, eh? - but it will quickly and easily cross the US$1 billion threshhold at the rate it’s going, and almost certainly peak closer to US$1.5 billion.

The bigger cultural question might be whether R-rated movies, especially the very, very funny ones, actually do the harm that their rating implies. A 2016 study of media-induced fright reactions in American primary school students suggested more than one third of the children surveyed were frightened by scenes in G- and PG-rated films.

Deadpool & Wolverine & Bambi? Whatever you do, don’t tell Disney.

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