Is 'The Hunger Games' Too Bloody? British Censors Say Yes

"The Hunger Games" premiered last night to a mostly positive response, setting the movie up for a huge nationwide opening next weekend. But there's one group that wasn't so happy with the movie: the British Board of Film Classification, a.k.a. the British censor.

The organization--which is the UK version of the MPAA and gives movies their ratings--took issue with the intense violence in "The Hunger Games," claiming that the post-apocalyptic flick needed to be cut in order to earn the UK equivalent of a PG-13 rating. Without the cuts, "The Hunger Games" would be more like an R-rated movie in the UK.

The result are small cuts amounting to seven seconds of screen time, taking out some of the gorier visuals in the story and earning the film the desired 12A rating it needs to allow teenagers to buy tickets without parental accompaniment.

This doesn't have much impact on American viewers, who will see the full, more bloody version that the MPAA has nonetheless given a PG-13 rating without much fuss. What it does mean, though, is that you can expect the film not to pull any punches in showing some of the more gruesome moments in the arena... a relief considering the importance of the brutality of it all to the theme of the series.