Looking for a wholesome, family-friendly film for your kids? You’d think you couldn’t get much more G-rated than Disney’s wondrous recent remake of The Lion King, but it was given a classification of PG, with the warning of “mild themes and violence”. A PG film may contain scenes “that children find confusing or upsetting”, according to the Australian classification system.

A G-rated, or “general audience” film is now hard to find. Apart from documentaries like Apollo 11, Armstrong and Amazing Grace, only a handful of G-rated films have been released this year, including Abominable, Toy Story 4 and the live-action Mary Poppins Returns.

Making films such as The Lion King with an aim for a PG rating can significantly boost their box-office sales. Credit:

“A lot of parents seem perfectly content taking their under-fives to PG movies,” notes Garry Maddox, who has been writing about cinema for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age for 21 years. “They check the consumer advice and know what their kids can handle based on what they’ve seen before.”

Once the standard classification for romcoms, sci-fi, westerns and action flicks from the 1970s to the late ’90s, the G-rating has fallen out of favour as films have become more explicit and violent over the past 20 years. But can the decline of the G-rating simply be chalked up to growing permissiveness?