Over the weekend, Amazon Prime Video released “Coming 2 America,” the much-anticipated sequel to the classic Eddie Murphy comedy, “Coming to America.” While the sequel has a ton of callbacks and cameos from the first film, there is one pretty big difference (other than the age of the characters) between the films—the rating. The sequel sports a PG-13 rating, while the original sits comfortably in the R-rated realm. And according to director Craig Brewer, though this does lead to less F-bombs, the PG-13 is actually a good thing.
Speaking to Insider, Brewer talked about the PG-13 rating for “Coming 2 America” and why he doesn’t believe it’s a necessity to keeping the spirit of the original film. And ultimately, it comes down to the fact that “Coming to America” is a very different film (tonally) than “Trading Places” and “48 Hrs.”
“Eddie and I had a lot of discussions about this because the bathers primarily pushed it into [an] R [rating] and then nowadays you can say the F word only a certain amount of times,” said Brewer. “But otherwise ‘Coming to America’ occupies a completely different place than any of the other Eddie Murphy movies like ‘Trading Places’ and ‘48 Hrs.’ It’s more of a fairy tale. It’s not particularly crude or vulgar in any way.”
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He added, “I noticed people on Twitter being like, ‘Oh my God, this movie’s PG-13. What have they done?’ The reality is the more we tested it, the jokes that landed were the ones that stayed there and it came out PG-13. We weren’t given [instructions that] ‘it better be PG-13.’ We did all different kinds of jokes and it landed in a sweet place. I’m actually happy it’s PG-13.”
If you’ve seen “Coming 2 America,” you can tell that there is far fewer curse words (obviously). And there are moments where you can imagine a hard F-bomb would have worked well. But outside of that, the sequel doesn’t really feel any better or worse with the PG-13. If anything, the complaints you might have about the new film (the overindulgence with cameos, callbacks, and whatnot) have little to do with the rating and more to do with the storytelling.
“Coming 2 America” is available now on Amazon Prime Video.