Black Adam really struggled to get a PG-13 rating

"One of the things he's known for is his aggression and violence, and to do a Black Adam movie that didn't have that just wouldn't have been authentic."

We already knew that Black Adam is something of a soft reboot of the DC Extended Universe, but another thing that Dwayne Johnson - who plays the titular character - has mentioned several times is how violent this antihero is. So how can you have that without making an R-rated movie?

Well, it turns out this wasn't easy. The producers Beau Flynn and Hiram Garcia say to Collider. It turns out they had to submit the movie to MPAA four times and really collaborate with them to get it done, something that only happened a month ago. Garcia explains why this was so important to them:

"We really wanted to make sure that we honored the character of Black Adam. One of the things he's known for is his aggression and violence, and to do a Black Adam movie that didn't have that just wouldn't have been authentic. So we always went into this knowing that we were going to push it as far as we did. We knew it was going to be a collaborative process with the MPAA to finally get it to where we were able, to get that rating, but we were able to pull it off. But it was really important for us to do that. And that's something Dwayne was very committed to as well."

Flynn confirms that there was a lot of editing involved removing the most gruesome violence:

"We did have to make a lot of edits, actually. There are some personal moments that we really love, but we had to let them go. But we never compromised, we never had to cut a scene. We had some really cool moments, and if you notice, there are some great moments when Black Adam is in the fly bike chase sequence and drops one of the intergang soldiers. Then there's this great moment where the truck bounces over the body. But those are moments that you need and remember in these movies, you know what I mean? You can't play it safe, and you have to go for it. And I think we have four or five of those. At one point we had about ten, and we were able to find some compromise with the MPAA on that."

We assume this means we can look forward to an R-rated version eventually, with a whole lot of extra content.