This must have passed us by when it happened last year, as the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) decided to reclassify Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, upping it’s rating from U to PG. This means that whilst it was once classified for all, it now requires parental guidance.
Underpinning everything we do at the BBFC is our classification work. We have over 100 years’ experience understanding what the UK public think about content. We talk to over 10,000 people every 4–5 years to revise our Classification Guidelines, with regular outreach in between to ensure our policies remain in step with parental expectations and societal standards on an ongoing basis.
As a result of changing standards in society, it’s not infrequent that a distributor will submit something to us that we have classified in the past but which we need to take a fresh look at under our current guidelines. In 2020 we reclassified some high-profile titles. We had given Rocky, the classic 1976 boxing drama, an A certificate when we first classified it, and it has always been a PG on video. For its 2020 theatrical re-release, we reclassified it 12A for moderate violence, mouthed strong language and domestic abuse.
Other films that we reclassified upwards to 12A in 2020 included the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (for moderate fantasy violence and threat), which brings it into line with the other two films in the trilogy, and two popular 1980 films re-released to celebrate their 40th anniversaries: the sci-fi fantasy Flash Gordon (for moderate violence, language, sex references and discriminatory stereotypes) and the biographical drama The Elephant Man (for moderate threat, upsetting scenes and injury detail). Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was also re-released, and we classified it PG for moderate violence and mild threat.
The re-classification of these films resulted in numerous complaints, the most coming from fans of Flash Gordon which was changed from PG to a 12A.
