Black Adam Was Originally Rated R, Had Many More Violent Kill Scenes

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's new DC movie, Black Adam, was originally rated R and had many more violent killing scenes until significant edits removed some of these to get the film down to a PG-13 rating.

Producer Hiram Garcia told Collider that Black Adam is known for his "aggression and violence," so the filmmakers want to produce a film that felt authentic to that.

"So we always went into this knowing that we were going to push it as far as we did. We knew it was going to be a collaborative process with the MPAA to finally get it to where we were able, to get that rating, but we were able to pull it off," Garcia said. "But it was really important for us to do that. And that's something Dwayne was very committed to as well."

Another producer, Beau Flynn, said the team went back and fourth with the MPAA four times to get the PG-13 rating. In this process, the filmmakers had to "make a lot of edits," Flynn said. That said, Flynn believes Black Adam doesn't compromise on its overall vision and tone.

"We never compromised; we never had to cut a scene," he said.

Flynn said there are "four or five" violent killing scenes in Black Adam, which is down from about 10 in an earlier cut. "We were able to find some compromise with the MPAA on that," Flynn said.

Black Adam won't have an R rating for its theatrical release, but Flynn teased that some of what was cut could show up in bonus features for the eventual home video release. "There are going to be some features for when we release on home video and streaming. There'll be some cool elements for that too..."

Black Adam opens in theaters this Friday, October 21. Reviews for the film began to appear online earlier this week, and scores were mixed. The film has a 45 metascore rating on GameSpot sister site Metacritic and a 55% on Rotten Tomatoes.