“Mockingjay” To Be Rated-R?
Those who have read the Suzanne Collins novel Mockingjay (finale of The Hunger Games series) might wonder how they can get those all-out battle sequences into a family-friendly PG-13 rated movie.
“Suzanne wrote these books for young people to be able to read them and discuss them and engage with them,” says producer Nina Jacobson, “and we would never make a version of the movies where they couldn’t participate in. They were the ones that started all of it and I think they deserve to have the movie be made for them to be able to see.”
With that said, it still might be split into two films, much like similar movie finales have been in recent years.
“There’s a whole movie to be made before we really know what we would do next,” says Jacobson. “But as far as the third book, I think that’s still a ‘to-be-determined.'”
Part 2 of Mockingjay is hitting theaters November 2015, and the second “half” of Mockingjay would be where the most descriptive scenes of war and violence in the entire series take place. November 2015 is a full five years after November 2010, a few months after Mockingjay, the BOOK, came out. If you weren’t at least reading The Hunger Games by then, you are not part of the initial fanbase that helped get the movie(s) made in the first place, and the movies shouldn’t be dumbed down for people who weren’t even twelve years old (the generally minimum recommended age group for these novels) when the books were finished.