The Suicide Squad received the most BBFC complaints of all 2021 movies, but there’s a catch, one that James Gunn wisely threw out into the Twitterverse.
“Still only 10 complaints,” Gunn tweeted along with a Yahoo! News link to the BBFC report, which revealed that the British Board of Film Classification indeed received only 10 complaints about the 15 age rating it gave to The Suicide Squad. While that’s enough to make Gunn’s DC villains adaptation the most complained-about movie of 2021, Walmart has received that many complaints in the last second.
In the entire year, the BBFC received just 109 complaints about its age ratings, of which the most (11) concerned Squid Game, which was also deemed appropriate for viewers 15 and older. Presumably, the vast majority of the BBFC’s objectors took issue with the ratings being too lenient. The organization defended its classification for The Suicide Squad thusly:
“While the film is comparatively more violent than the previous film in the series, the focus on action within a comic, fantastical, superhero context mitigated against the violence and gore. We therefore classified the film 15.”
In a later tweet, Gunn stated that “previous years were in the hundreds – Joker got 149. So I think they were happy with 10.” Although he’s right that in other years the BBFC received far more complaints, such as 149 in 2019, and 361 in 2018, Joker received only 20, which is still double The Suicide Squad.
Thanks to Gunn, those who didn’t read the fine print now know that the BBFC’s “most complained-about movie” is just 10 grievances apart from its least complained-about movie.