I can see that partially being linked to the PG era too. With many movies being tamed down to a PG-13, the R rated movies go out of their way to "earn" their rating, as a bit of a selling point gimmick for people old enough to see them. I think the line of thought there is "if it's going to get R rated, we may as well go all out so it sells."
While I understand the decision business-wise to cut movies to PG-13, making a movie to fit the rating is backwards imo. Movies should be made to whatever the story calls for, and then whatever you produce gets rated. I feel like Hollywood movies these days have to be one extreme or the other.
This is why I tend to avoid Hollywood movies these days, and gravitate towards older movies, and foreign movies (and occasionally indie movies), because they feel much more natural in terms of their usage of language and violence, instead of being such a conscious and often contrived decision motivated purely by money.
Exactly. Hence my comment above. The real issue isn't so much the ratings system itself (although that has problems, too), but rather the fact that Hollywood is geared around maximizing profit above all else, including telling a good story. Towards that end, they'll eliminate violence JUST to get a film to a PG-13 rating, because they believe that you can bring in bigger crowds for such a film. They're right, probably, too. Parents will let their 11-year-old go to a PG-13 film, but might balk at sending the kid to an R-rated film. And as long as the film is structured and marketed effectively, you know the older audiences will still show up. So, you get your widest piece of the demographic pie with a PG-13 rating, and therefore, you target the film to that. End of story.
So, that means less sex, less explicit violence, but you can still have more adult "themes" like sexual INNUENDO or IMPLIED violence.
Personally, I'd rather the story be the story, but let's be honest here: that's not the case with ANY Hollywood film nowadays, outside of Oscar-bait. When you look at the genres that this board is drawn to (sci-fi, superheroes, fantasy, action), you're pretty much guaranteed to have some sanitized PG-13 product because that's how you score the biggest market.
And from a production standpoint, this all makes perfect sense. I mean, why WOULDN'T you do that? Why would you knowingly eliminate a decent portion of your audience just to show some boobs and blood spatter? You can still do 'splosions. You can still do a naked back or implied sex. You don't need the rest, necessarily.
I also think that this ties into Sandman's point above, that the few R-rated movies you DO see these days are often way over the top in their violence, to an almost cartoonish degree. Example: the relatively recent Rambo film where Rambo uses an M2 .50 cal on a guy at point blank range and basically evaporates the dude (well, his head anyway), all using mostly CGI for the blood and gore. Now, while it's true that that's what a .50 cal does vs. infantry, the scene seems almost gratuitous. It's extreme, particularly in a landscape of otherwise sanitized violence. Same story with the recent Dredd film. The violence was extreme. It fit the film, but it was extreme nonetheless. By contrast, if you go back to a lot of the 80s action flicks, the violence really isn't that intense.
