R-rated movies often reflect the story more realistically and make them compelling. That’s the reason now the MCU is doing R-rated movies, and with this, Phase 4 will going to be a much bigger deal. Marvel already announced that Deadpool 3 will officially be the first R-rated movie in the MCU.
But there’s another MCU movie that is R-rated. It’s Yann Demange’s sword-wielding vampire hunter Blade. It signals that the studio is willing to give creative teams more freedom.
This will definitely allow for more mature storytelling from typical family-family MCU films. Now, this one thing is sure: the similar ratings between Mahershala Ali’s Blade and Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool 3 will surely give fans a whole lot of different experiences.
MCU Director Shared Similar Elements in Blade and Deadpool 3
Yann Demange (the director of the upcoming MCU Blade movie) has claimed his big-screen Marvel adaptation will be R-rated. The director told Deadline.:
“They gave me the R, which is so important. For Blade, we are going to have fun because Mahershala is such a deep actor. I’m excited to show a kind of ruthlessness, a roughness he has, that allows him to walk the earth in a particular way.”
Demange continued that he loved Blade for that. “He’s got a dignity and integrity, but there is a ferocity there that he usually keeps under the surface. I want to unleash that and put it on the screen,” he added.
But the point here to note is that Marvel has not confirmed the rating of the movie yet. And the recent rumors suggest that the Blade release date may have been postponed to allow a full rewrite of the script.
MCU’s Blade Rating is Yet to be Confirmed
Earlier, Marvel’s president, Kevin Feige, had stated that Blade would not receive an R-rating. In an interview with Deadline, he said that among all the films in production for Marvel’s Phase 5 and Phase 6, only Deadpool 3 was going to have an R-rating.
“Other than Deadpool, which has already established itself as a certain genre and a certain rating, that we already said we would not mess with when we started working on Deadpool,” Feige explained. “Other than that, we haven’t encountered a story or a storyline or a character’s journey that a PG-13 rating, or the tone, or the ratings we’ve been using up to this point has prevented us [from telling that story.]”
Whether Blade will be R-rated or not will only depend on the confirmation of the Marvel. But it’s great to see that Marvel is following a fresh approach to give the audience a unique experience in its storytelling. Apart from Blade and Deadpool 3, it is also premiering a five-episode TV show, Echo (starting January 2024), with a TV-MA rating.
