http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AvoidTheDreadedGRating

Doug Walker, reviewing Finding Dory "I don't know why it's PG. Uh, we're getting in that stupid thing again where it's like, 'Oh, we gotta throw in a swear word or some kind of innuendo,' to be like, you know, 'Oh! We got the PG rating! So, see kids? You know, you don't have to think this is dorky or anything 'cause we have the PG, so we said something adult!'"

Movies may be art and intended by writers and directors to tell stories, but as far as the funders and distributors are concerned, films need to make money and get the biggest possible audience. Achieving this may involve lying about a movie's content, showing all the best parts, or, with family movies, changing the rating.

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Perception means a lot — R ratings tend to indicate something for adults (but not always). G ratings often indicate something for kids. In between are PG and PG-13 movies. So with a lot of otherwise perfectly clean, family-friendly movies, the word "damn" or "hell" (or both) might be added to the script, just to drop that dreaded G rating. The phrase "brief mild language" appearing as a content warning is a giveaway. At PG, the movie has a better shot at avoiding the "kid stuff" stigma that keeps teen or adult viewers away.

Adding a little swearing makes the film easy to edit for TV or airplane viewings without it interrupting the story. Sometimes stronger profanity is unnecessarily added, or the characters pay an irrelevant and fleeting visit to a strip club, or scenes are made more violent. Content is sometimes added to get an intentional PG-13 rating, or removed from a potential R-rated movie for the same reason. It's all about trying to get a certain audience to watch the film.

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Ironically, the average G-rated film makes more money than the average R-rated film, but maybe only because G-ratings are rarer. In the United Kingdom, the practice is sometimes known as "twelve-ing" or "fifteening" since many producers target the BBFC 12/12-A or 15 ratings instead of the PG rating, which has gained a similar reputation as the MPAA G.

Today in the United States, it's nearly impossible to get a G rating on any live-action or even All-CGI Cartoon movie without some serious negotiation. It apparently is to reinforce the Animation Age Ghetto; the MPAA is more than happy to rate something as PG for "nothing offensive" because it's live action. Almost no live-action or CG-animated movies make it to theaters with a G rating anymore.note Movies in Pixar's Toy Story and Cars series are the exception, though this may just be due to the Grandfather Clause.

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It wasn't always this way. Since 1968, when modern MPAA ratings began, the G rating has shifted and been significantly Flanderized. Originally, "G" ratings were for movies for a "General" audience, not for "Grandmas (probably Grandpas as well) and Goo-goo-babies." The earliest G-rated films not only included violence, but sometimes even showed blood. Planet of the Apes (1968), released the same year the MPAA ratings started, was rated G, but you saw Charlton Heston's bare butt and violence, and heard "damned dirty ape" and "God damn you all to hell!" A few years later in 1971, Gone with the Wind was re-released with a G rating despite the racism, barely-off-screen sex, open bloodshed, and a sea of dead bodies — not to mention the most famous use of the word "damn" in cinematic history. As late as 1979, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was rated G despite a couple of horrific deaths by Teleporter Accident, as well as references to sexuality.

The change happened in the early 1980s, about after complaints from Moral Guardians about movies like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins and Poltergeist, all of which received PG ratings, and thus were seen by many young children who really shouldn't have. After this, the MPAA introduced the PG-13 rating, so movies that would've been PG under the old standard became PG-13, with the more "mature" G movies now becoming PG. Thus, the demographic for films that remained G became very young.note This happened shortly before VCRs took off. It turned out that the sort of film that could get a G rating after that is the sort that is usually more profitable direct to video.

Then in the late 1990s, the MPAA became more lenient on what PG and PG-13 films could show (a phenomenon referred to as "ratings creep", which might have pretty much been the result of too many pics sneaking certain content only to achieve a higher rating), although the requirements for the "G" rating essentially remained the same. This gulf soon cemented the public reputation of G-rated films as "kiddie fare", and by 2000, over half of all G-rated films released on a given year were produced or distributed by Disney.

Beginning in 2010 however, the MPAA reversed course and imposed stricter regulations over its ratings after a decade of continued pressure, which effectively killed "G" as a mainstream rating, applying only to absolutely "non-offensive" material (a key example is 2019's The Lion King, rated PG in spite of being a near Shot-for-Shot Remake of a film that was rated G in 1994). This also severely affected the PG rating as well, which pretty much became synonymous with animated films and Disney movies by the second half of the decade, with films now targeting the PG-13 rating.

Oscar Bait films often add some "stronger" content to get a PG-13 or R rating whereas their general tone would be that of a PG-rated film, as few films with this rating have won the Best Picture Award (1968's Oliver! is the only G-rated film to win Best Picture, but it is also considered to be one of the award's weakest winners ever).

This also has applied to higher ratings, namely "R" and "X"/"NC-17": The latter rating was originally meant to be available to anyone that desired to avoid the scrutiny of the ratings process, but this ended up backfiring as the letter "X" soon became synonymous with sex. In 1990, the "NC-17" rating was introduced after acclaimed films such as Atame, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and sex, lies, and videotape were either assigned "X" ratings or went unrated, but exhibitors and the media were leery over it, and it soon fell practically into disuse, with filmmakers preferring to eschew the ratings system for works with strong adult content. Meanwhile, theater owners began giving less and less space to R-rated films after 2010, which has led many studios to release two versions of certain films: a PG-13 one for theaters and an "R-rated" one for home video, an extension of the "unrated cuts" often used in the home releases of several R-rated comedies in the 2000s.

Later attempts to content-rate other media in the United States used the by-now-obvious shortcomings of the MPAA system as an object lesson. When U.S. television created its "parental guideline" ratings in the late 1990s, the "G is for Grandma" effect was mentioned specifically, and is almost certainly the motivation for the U.S. TV rating system having both a TV-Y rating and a TV-G rating: TV-Y is "specifically for kids", and TV-G means "nothing offensive." Similarly, the ESRB ratings for video games, needing to account for both content and playability, have both the "E for Everyone" rating and others for younger age groups (some lower-end E10+ games suffer as well, albeit to a lesser extent). Even though the video game industry is no stranger to edginess for marketing's sake, this trope is probably least common in video games. That said, "E for Everyone" changed from its original name, "K-A for Kids to Adults", specifically because games sold better among older gamers when the rating didn't have "kid" in it.

See Rated M for Money, and for more information on the rating systems, see Media Classifications.

This is NOT about movies that just happen to have a high rating. It is only about when something clearly unnecessary and unneeded is added to bump the rating higher, because without it the rating would be lower than what the company wants. Also note that it's not always certain what caused a movie to get (or not get) a certain rating, as outside a few guidelines, the MPAA ratings are a black box.

Examples:

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Anime and Manga

Manga Entertainment became notorious during the 1990s for generously peppering their dubs with profanity in order to get "18" ratings in Britain, with the results being quite often hilarious .

often hilarious . The original North American licensor for Sgt. Frog, ADV Films, intended on getting the show on a children's network like Nickelodeon. Once Funimation got the license, it was clear that they had no intent to do so, and tried their best to sell it to a modern anime fan by making sure it at least got a PG rating - while some of the show is almost better for it (episode 18 with Natsumi's bleeped Cluster F-Bomb works better than a Kansai accent for an American audience), sometimes it just feels gratuitous (on one memorable occasion Keroro says "pain in the ass" and the voice actor feels like he's forcing it). This didn't even work in Nova Scotia, where FUNimation's version still got a G rating. This is somewhat justified as the original Sgt. Frog manga was much closer to a PG-13 rating, but the anime was toned down to be more child-friendly. FUNimation's take on it might be trying to restore its original age rating to appeal to the manga's more diehard fans.

Inverted by Pokémon: The First Movie: it was rated G despite its strong violence and its disturbing themes and images. Ironically, it was given a PG rating in Canada, which is generally more lenient about movie ratings.

Sentai Filmworks definitely want to give the Gintama movie a high rating: the word "fuck" is used three times in the dub, as well as profanities like "shit" and "asshole", along with a few crude sex jokes. The sub (and the actual Gintama show) do not have this kind of language.

Averted by Paprika. The majority of the film is made in a PG or PG-13 matter (and was rated as such in most countries) - even when touching upon adult subject matter it keeps things discreet. There's also not a bit of profanity anywhere in the film - not even a "damn" or "hell". However, the movie got an R rating simply due to a few moments of non-sexual nudity and an image of a bloody corpse.

Fan Works

Averted in Curse of the DualShock, rated PG. Although the pups are from the Y-rated series PAW Patrol, it crosses over with E 10+ video game Minecraft, which contains some mild cartoon and fantasy violence.

Despite the Sonic X fanfic Don't Keep Your Distance carrying a "T" rating on Fanfiction Dot Net, there's little non-kid-friendly content to speak of besides a few minor and forced sexual jokes, main character Paint bleeding mildly from injuries in one scene (with little apparent consequence), and a scene where two minor characters are apparently taking some type of unnamed depressant drug together. It's more than likely that this has to do with T ratings inherently attracting more visitors than the more modest "K+". In general, many fanfic writers will give their stories T ratings to attract more readers.

Diamond in the Rough, based on the film Aladdin, has two uses of "hell" and "prick" putting it slightly out of Disney territory.

Films — Animation

Films — Live-Action

Literature

Life, the Universe and Everything features the "Award for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word 'Fuck' in a Serious Screenplay", a reference to this trope. It's also arguably an example, as the word "fuck" is rarely used in the books otherwise. As the radio adaptation was broadcast at 6.30pm, there was always a convenient starship engine roar whenever the award in question was discussed. The American edition of the book uses the word "Belgium" instead. It is still a reference to this trope, since the text explains that "Belgium" is the vilest swear word imaginable on every planet in the galaxy...except Earth.



Live-Action TV

Video Games

Web Comics

Tailsteak wrote a comic on the stinger to his hypothetical movie; said stinger consists of him in person saying a wall of swear words to boost the movie's rating up from PG to PG-13.

Web Original