It's generally understood in the movie-making business that fewer people will see a movie if said film is rated R. From a basic numbers standpoint this makes sense, as an R rating reduces the amount of overall people who can see the movie in a theater. With that in mind, it's rare to see a film with major box office potential be anything other than PG or PG-13. Comic book movies, specifically, are a gamble if they're rated R. Which would explain reports that Hugh Jackman took a massive pay cut to make sure that the upcoming Wolverine movie Logan is rated R.
Recently, the R-rated Deadpool, with its $760.3 million at the box office, proved to be a success given its comparatively modest $58 million budget. And that's the thing: These gambles often must be cheap enough to make in order to reduce the cost if the R-rated superhero film doesn't hit. Shortly after The Wolverine in 2013, rumors circulated that Fox was offering Hugh Jackman $100 million to appear in the next four X-Men movies. Now, according to Ain't It Cool's Eric Vespe, Logan director James Mangold claimed that Jackman accepted a lower salary for the film to bring the budget down to an acceptable place to warrant an R rating.
This fits with the tone of what we've seen in the first impressive Logan trailer, which shows an old-ass, haggard Logan wandering a desolate middle-American wasteland. It's like if Cormac McCarthy randomly decided to write a story in the X-Men universe. And the R rating, along with Jackman's faith in the tone of the film, gives even more hope for what looks like a promising Wolverine installment. Or maybe he really just wants to see a whole lot more blood.
