Even going back to Comic-Con in San Diego last year, director McG has not been committing to what his upcoming franchise relaunch Terminator Salvation would be rated, saying that Warner Bros.’ President of Production Jeff Robinov didn’t care and just wanted McG to make the best movie he could. Ever since then, McG had cited The Dark Knight (PG-13), The Matrix (R) as two of the movies made under Robinov’s regime that proved that ratings don’t really matter either way.
Today, during the WonderCon panel, McG mentioned having a topless scene of the film’s lovely heroine Moon Bloodgood, who is being seen as a homage to Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, and in his usual flair of showmanship, he put it to the audience whether or not they want to see that scene in the movie. Needless to say, the mostly male audience enthusiastically chose the former.
After the panel, we asked McG directly about this issue, especially since just a few weeks back, we saw a lot of the cool toys that Playmates had come up with based on the movie that were clearly geared towards a younger audience. McG gave us the same speech about how he only cared about what Jeff Robinov wanted, then added, “We never once gave a thought to rating. Do you think Christian would go in and go, ‘I need to tailor my performance to hit a rating.’ He didn’t want to do that, I didn’t want to do that. We would never do that. Now having said that, should the film be PG-13? ‘The Dark Knight’ is PG-13 and I would regard that as made without compromise.”
If McG is toying with the idea of a possible topless scene certainly that would be a part of the factor that goes into the rating though, right? “But it wasn’t a function of the rating. It was a function of whether it’s gratuitous or is it servicing the story? Sometimes, you want to say that the softness of the human flesh is one of the things we’re fighting for. It’s decidedly human and it’s not like the machines. Or does it just feel like a juvenile moment in an otherwise very serious film?” (McG also cited the beautiful scene of Kate Winslet’s Rose posing for Leo in the nude in James Cameron’s Titanic, which was in fact PG-13.)
Ms. Bloodgood herself chimed in about the scene when we spoke to her later. “It’s not like we’re trying to be shallow, it’s like who cares? I fight so much against nudity, but I’m a woman, I have boobs, it’s a beautiful shot. It wasn’t at all gratuitous. I’m not afraid to say ‘no.’ I would have said, ‘No, I’m not doing it,’ and I’ve done that, but it was beautiful. Did you ever just want to get naked and connect to someone? Imagine the world is coming to an end and you just want to connect with someone and you’re like, ‘I don’t care.'”
Speaking of those toys, Ms. Bloodgood was pretty thrilled to find out that she indeed will have her own action figure in the near future, as will her co-star, rapper Common, who plays fellow Resistance fighter Barnes.
We’ll have more from the Terminator Salvation presentation posted soon, but in the meantime, let us know how you feel about the rating situation with the movie.
