Sask. scraps age-based ratings and mandatory classification for movies

Exit to Eden is a mostly forgotten film released in 1994, but Frank Cox remembers the box-office bomb well.

The Melville Theatre owner said it made him and other Saskatchewan theatres a lot of money.

The Hollywood comedy starring Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell was partly set at a BDSM-themed resort and included full-frontal female nudity. Before it could screen, the Saskatchewan Film Classification Board banned it. Saskatchewan was the only place in the world to do so.

But the publicity just led more people to see it when the board reversed its decision, Cox said.

“That movie was suddenly the hottest thing in Saskatchewan. I had lineups of people down the block that wanted to see it simply because it had been banned,” he recalled.

“Had it initially just been classified as ‘Restricted’ and left alone, it probably would have played for a weekend in the big city theatres and quietly disappeared without a trace.”

In the controversy’s aftermath, the provincial government decided to outsource classification for new films to a similar provincial agency in B.C. which uses the Saskatchewan age-based rating system.

Currently, every film screened, rented or sold here — new or old — must have a classification or rating through what is now called the Saskatchewan Film Classification office, which is part of the Financial and Consumer Affairs Authority (FCAA). There are some exceptions, and theatres can use previous ratings from other provinces.

But on April 1, the Sask. Party government’s Film Content Information Act takes effect and scraps the age-based rating requirement for theatrical films. Theatres won’t have to submit new films — or old films that haven’t been rated here yet — to the government for classification.

Instead of using the familiar PG or 18A ratings, theatres will be required to write and display their own content descriptions of films they show, according to the FCAA, which is responsible for film classification.

The FCAA declined to be interviewed for this story.

Cox said he welcomes the changes. He doesn’t want to police what people can watch and doesn’t think the government should do so either, he said.

“[After April 1] you can pretty much just pick the movies that you want to play based on the merits of the movie and what people in your area want to see rather than having to just say, ‘OK, here is this list of officially approved movies. Pick one of those,'” Cox said.

“Over the course of time, the standards around movies have changed and people’s expectations have changed. So a film rating that was valid 30 years ago is not particularly relevant to what people want to see today.”

Scott Hamilton programs films for the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon. While movie distributors often pay to get a film classified, the cost falls to theatres when they don’t, he said.

“It makes the film maybe a little less attractive because all of a sudden I’ve doubled my costs for running that film. And it might scare me off of running something that is, I think, artistically really exciting,” Hamilton said.

The FCAA set out to revamp its film classification system in 2023 and sought input from the theatre industry. The Legislature passed the Film Content Information Act in 2024, but it comes into force April 1.

It can cost up to $300 to get a film classified if it hasn’t been already, which can be prohibitive for smaller, independent theatres, Hamilton said.

“Especially for a place like us that runs a lot of unorthodox films, there’s just so much red tape attached to the process and this cuts down on so much of that for me.”