Fantasy Island, Blumhouse’s remake of the ‘70s television show of the same name, opened in theatres over the past weekend, making it a possible movie option for movie-goers looking to celebrate Valentine’s Day.
Like it or hate it, Fantasy Island has a box office earnings of US$22 million worldwide on a US$7 million budget, making it a definite win for Blumhouse despite its less than stellar reviews. The film starred Lucy Hale, Maggie Q, Michael Pena, Jimmy O Yang, Ryan Henson, Austin Stowell, and Portia Doubleday.
It was recently revealed by the film’s director Jeff Wadlow that the PG-13 Fantasy Island was supposed to be a rated “R” movie though we aren’t sure if a higher rating would have helped the film’s reviews in any way.
In an interview with Cinema Blend, Wadlow mentioned that he had originally wanted the film to be R-rated before responses from their test audiences convinced Jason Blum to change the movie to a PG-13 one.
“Upfront I said, ‘Jason Blum, the movie has to be rated R.’ And it’s not. That’s great example of having to change and kind of go with the flow. I felt that it had to be R, and I thought I shot an R movie, but then when we showed it to an audience we were like, ‘Well, it’s not really that R.’ And just a couple of trims and it was a PG-13.”
He adds, “There’ll be a slightly edgier cut that will be available later on. But the movie works, it’s much more about character and emotion, and it doesn’t matter if a movie’s PG-13 or R – those things come through when you have great actors like we have in our film.
From what Wadlow has said, it seems he didn’t make too many changes going from a soft R to a PG-13 rating, so not much of the film’s story should be changed. At any rate, it seems a rated-R version will likely be released for home video so we can just wait till then to see exactly how much has been changed.
Germaine is a fun-sized introvert who loves nothing better than sleeping in on rainy days. She can be found reading fanfiction and manga while still waiting for her Hogwarts acceptance letter. It’ll come eventually.
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