At the Box Office, R Doesn’t Rate as High as PG

Don’t expect to see the kind of gory scenes showing guts being spilled out of a scientist’s stomach that were in Michael Crichton’s book “Jurassic Park.” Director Steven Spielberg’s intention is to frighten audiences by suggestion--a la “Jaws”--in his $56-million movie version for Universal Pictures.

And Arnold Schwarzenegger, the king of high-violence R-rated movies from “The Terminator” to “Total Recall” to “T2,” is becoming a PG-13 man in his current picture, “The Last Action Hero” for Columbia Pictures.

Sources said one of the many screenwriters on “The Last Action Hero,” Shane Black, was hired to rewrite the script with express instructions not to make the action or language too intense for kids. The story concerns a boy who enters the world of his favorite screen action hero (played by Schwarzenegger) and the adventures they have together.

What gives? Is Hollywood going soft--or just becoming savvy? Insiders say it’s more of the latter.

“(The studios) want 10-year-olds to go to their movies--and they want them to go 10 times,” said an action-genre screenwriter who’s also written scripts of the “two cops running around shooting at everything” variety. “A ‘Home Alone 2’ for every studio,” he added.

There are plenty of R-rated movies around to suit adult tastes--”Dracula” and “Under Siege” just to name two recent hits--but something is happening here that would suggest the future trend might go the other way. Even Eddie Murphy, reported here last week as reprising his role as the funny, foul-mouthed Axel Foley in Paramount’s “Beverly Hills Cop III,” has agreed to dialogue deemed more appropriate by the Motion Picture Assn. of America for teen-age ears.

Hollywood is taking note of two recent studies--one by film critic Michael Medved and the other by entertainment industry consulting firm Paul Kagan Associates Inc.--positing that PG-13 and lower-rated features are more likely to turn a profit than those rated R.

The Kagan Associates study released late last month said that between 1984 and 1991, statistics it compiled on 1,187 major releases showed that 27.4% of the R-rated movies generated more than $20 million at the domestic box office compared to 36.2% for those rated PG-13, 41.2% for those rated PG and 30% for those rated G.

Kagan analyst Dave Davis attributed the discrepancy, in part, on the fact that the profit ceiling on many celebrated R-rated pictures goes way up because of their high production costs, citing “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and “Basic Instinct” as examples.

Medved’s contention in his controversial book “Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values” is that Americans are turning off to Hollywood movies in impressive numbers because of their morally-bankrupt content. He contrasts the era of “The Sound of Music,” the Oscar winner for best picture in 1965, when weekly attendance was 44 million to today’s figure of 18.5 million.

In compiling his own separate set of statistics, he comes to the same conclusion as the Kagan study: Make a good, clean movie and people will come.

Many critics derided Medved’s holier-than-thou tone--Time called him “The Magistrate of Morals,” a New York magazine writer said his views were “dangerous”--yet studio honchos can’t seem to ignore the money factor.

“I’d like to think (the industry) is motivated by conscience or some sense of morality, but the fact is, if you make an R-rated movies, you exclude a large part of the audience,” said one studio exec. “It’s not, ‘Let’s have less of a body count,’ it’s about knowing a lower rating transfers to dollars.”

Walt Disney Studios excels in this area, due in no small part because it has been in the family movie business the longest, with an emphasis on animated feature film production tied to merchandising. Just last week sales of its G-rated “Beauty and the Beast” videos surpassed the 14.5-million mark--an industry record.

As much as Spielberg might want to re-create the carnage and oozing viscera in Crichton’s best-selling dinosaur novel, the director always intended that the movie have a PG-13 rating. Spielberg knows his audience and besides, Universal Pictures is planning a massive licensing and merchandising campaign to coincide with the release of the picture.

These tie-ins to toys, video games and clothes can mean millions of dollars in additional revenue to the studio; the “Batman” phenomenon accounted for an estimated $1 billion in worldwide merchandise sales.

As for “The Last Action Hero,” Columbia hasn’t announced yet all the plans it has to cross-promote its $70-million picture. One deal, however, is a first for a Schwarzenegger action picture: A fast-food tie-in at Burger King.