The upcoming period adventure drama The Lost City Of Z lost its appeal to the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating board to overturn the “R” rating the board had previously given the film.
The film, which stars Charlie Hunnam, Sienna Miller and Robert Pattinson, was given the rating for “brief violence”, tells the real-life story of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, a British explorer at the turn of the last century who believed that there the ruins of an ancient civilization where waiting in the Amazon rain forests to be discovered. The producers of the film met with the ratings board late last week to plead their case for a lower rating but their argument fell on deaf ears.
Lost City Of Z is set for an April 21 release via Bleecker Street, and that might be the problem. The MPAA’s ratings board has a history of giving films that are not from the major studios who fund the group stricter ratings than films from those studios. Why is that, you may ask. A more restrictive rating will be more limited at the box office by who can buy tickets. Currently Lost City Of Z is scheduled to open opposite the thriller Unforgettable. That film is from Warner Brothers, one of the members of the MPAA. Unforgettable has not been rated yet, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it pulled a PG-13, giving it a significant advantage at the box office.
