For many years, superhero movies and TV shows worked hard to keep it family-friendly, but over time, R-rated and TV-MA actually delivered successful movies and shows as well. While things like Superman need to keep a family-friendly rating, as do the Avengers movies, there started to be movies that tested the waters of R-rated movies, including titles like Punisher and Blade. Now, even the MCU has bought into some R-rated movies, thanks to Deadpool’s success, and James Gunn has no problem delivering TV-MA shows on HBO Max such as Peacemaker. What is most interesting is that these adult-oriented releases are just as successful as the family-friendly ones.
Here is a look at 10 R-rated movies and TV-MA shows that totally earned their ratings.
7) Peacemaker
Peacemaker is a show that survived James Gunn coming into the DCU, as it had its first season before Gunn took over and then he repurposed it for a second season when he came aboard, and made some changes to help it morph into his new vision. What he kept was the TV-MA rating, as the first and second seasons included nudity and excessive violence. This was not a show for the kids, but it was still critically acclaimed, and John Cena earned high praise for his performance. Peacemaker never would have been the same without its adult rating, and it deserved it and succeeded because of it.
6) Dredd
Dredd was a great movie that not enough people watched. After the terrible Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd movie in the 1990s, not enough people gave Karl Urban’s Dredd a chance. It also didn’t help that Dredd had a similar plot to The Raid, so it seemed almost like a copycat movie. However, this was a great movie, and with the same ideas from the comics, it used the R-rating to good effect thanks to the overall violence of the episode. There is still hope for a Dredd sequel, and more people need to be watching the original movie.
5) The Boys
The Boys had no chance of making a TV show or movie without being R-rated or TV-MA. Thankfully, for the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book, it found a home on Prime Video, a streaming service that has no problem with delivering TV-MA material, including in their original streaming shows. The Boys has several moments that have to be R-rated, from Homelander’s willingness to kill anyone in gruesome ways to things like the “Herogasm” episode. While the show wasn’t as graphic as the comics, it has easily earned its TV-MA rating.
4) Daredevil: Born Again
One of the more surprising statistics is that Daredevil: Born Again is TV-MA. The reason this is surprising is that the show is part of the mainline MCU and is not gory or filled with profanity like the Deadpool movie. However, it has a lot of realistic violence and some hardcore fight scenes, matching up with what Netflix did so well when Daredevil and the other street-level shows aired on that streaming service. The MCU reboot has been great, and its realistic violence and graphically explicit fight scenes have helped it earn its rating while keeping the quality up.
3) Deadpool & Wolverine
The first two Deadpool movies more than earned their R-ratings, with Deadpool killing people without remorse and in some graphically hilarious manners. However, Deadpool & Wolverine took it one step further by bringing in characters from all over the Marvel Universe to partake in the fun, and even with the MCU now in control. It never once held back on the violence, profanity, and innuendoes in its dialogue. This movie not only earned its R-rating, but it made over $1 billion at the box office and proved the MCU could make serious money on R-rated film releases.
2) Invincible
Being R-rated or TV-MA doesn’t even include live-action alone anymore. If any show has earned its TV-MA rating and still delivered fantastic storytelling and exciting action, it is Prime Video’s Invincible. Based on the comics by Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), Invincible took the gore to the extreme. The deaths in this animated series are so over the top that blood flows like water, and people have holes punched through their bodies and their heads squashed, all shown up close and personal. There isn’t a more violent superhero show on television, and there is no way this could be made in live-action without neutering it completely. Nothing is as graphically violent as Invincible, and the animation is the only way the streamer could allow it.
1) Blade
The first movie that was a huge success as an R-rated superhero movie had almost nothing in common with superhero movies. Before X-Men and Spider-Man proved that Marvel could succeed with their superhero output, Marvel released the R-rated horror movie Blade. Starring Wesley Snipes as the vampire hunter, this was not really presented as a superhero movie, and it was straight horror, with some graphic depictions of the killing of vampires, and it totally earned its R-rating. The Blade movie opened with a graphically violent scene, and if anything, it proved at the time that an R-rating could work well in superhero movies, even if, at the time, it was limited to horror.
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