The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been rating movies for almost 50 years. The rat

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been rating movies for almost 50 years. The ratings we are most familiar with today (G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17) provide general guidelines for the minimum ages of viewers (though many would disagree with ratings for particular films). In addition to the letter rating, the MPAA writes a brief, sometimes comical, justification for ratings above G, identifying what in the film would not be suitable for all children. Using data from IMDB, I ran a word frequency analysis on the ratings of 15,715 movies, binned by rating. The histogram shows the usage frequency of the 21 words that occur in >10% of explanations for at least one rating category. For example, the word “language” appears in the rating description of 62.5% of PG, 47.8% of PG-13, 80.9% of R, and 3.0% of NC-17 movies. Common words (e.g., articles, prepositions, conjunctions) were excluded. While I find word clouds to be completely useless as a tool for conveying statistical significance, I wanted to provide a larger selection of common words in ratings. As word clouds are more attractive than lists, I’ve generated one for each rating. The NC-17 cloud is smaller because there are few films in this category, and thus there was a smaller pool of common words. A few fun facts: -The word “explicit” appears in 58.2% of NC-17 ratings, but only 0.1% of R ratings. Conversely, “mild” is used in 53.2% of PG ratings, but only 0.2% of PG-13 ratings. -While “sexual” is common in PG-13 (29.7%), R (26.2%), and NC-17 (41.8%) rating descriptions, “sexuality” frequently occurs only in R (32.4%) and NC-17 (34.3%) films; in PG-13, “sexuality” is observed only 7.5% of the time. -“Violence” is the only word to be used in >20% of each of the four ratings, peaking at 56.8% in R-rated movies. Data source: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces (plain text data files) -- source link

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