Deadpool, the horribly violent, disgustingly crude and, for many people, very funny superhero romp, was the film which last year generated the most complaints to Britain’s film censors.

The 2016 annual report of the British Board of Film Classification reveals that the Marvel movie received 51 complaints. That was followed by Suicide Squad with 30 and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children with 20.

For Deadpool, it was the bloody violence, strong language and sex references that generated the complaints.

The report, published on Tuesday, defended the 15 certificate given to the movie, which stars Ryan Reynolds as a puerile mercenary with super healing powers.

It said the violence was “strong and frequently bloody” but “this often occurs during fast-paced action sequences with little focus on detail”.

The strong sex references were mostly in the form of “comic verbal quips or innuendo”, the report continued, and while there was a lot of swearing there was no upper limit on usage for a certificate 15 film. “The sex references and language are therefore acceptable at the classification,” it said.

Complaints about Suicide Squad, the DC Comics baddie superhero ensemble movie starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie, were mostly from people objecting that it had a 15 rating – meaning younger children could not watch it.

The concerns about Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, on the other hand, were that it was too scary for a 12A rating. The report acknowledged that the film had monster characters which feed on eyeballs but the scenes “are infrequent and the fantasy setting of the film as a whole reduces the intensity of these moments”.

The complaints about Deadpool, enjoyed as “an innocent pleasure” by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, exceed those made for last year’s most complained-about film – Spectre and a gruesome eye-gouging scene, which drew 40 objections.

Away from complaints, the BBFC report said 1,075 cinema releases were age rated in 2016, the most since 1957. To put that in context, almost twice as many films were released in British cinemas compared with 2009. More films were rated 15 (401) than any other age rating.

There was also a huge increase in digital content submitted – an 85% rise in the number of minutes compared with 2015, with Netflix sending more titles to the BBFC than any other maker.