The director’s cut of Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire has seemingly got a new title and an official R-rating ahead of its release on Netflix.
The first part of Zack Snyder’s sci-fi saga appeared on the Film Ratings website, with an alternative title of Rebel Moon – Chapter One: Chalice of Blood for the director’s cut. It is also rated R for “brutal, bloody violence and gore, sexual content, graphic nudity and language,” as opposed to the PG-13 rating of the original release.
Snyder has teased the R-rated director’s cuts of Rebel Moon for quite some time, but this is the first official confirmation that the MPAA has deemed it worthy of the “R.” The director previously said the extended, more adult version is “fun and subversive because an R-rated sci-fi movie at this scale shouldn’t exist.”
“They’re each about an hour longer than the originals, the PG-13 [versions],” he told I Minutemen of the director’s cuts. “So it’ll be nice to see the six hours together. You can take a break, of course. It’s a more, maybe, immersive experience. I’m interested for people to see it that way. It’s very adult, it’s very R-rated.”
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire was not well-received by critics or audiences when it hit screens in 2023. The film boasts a 21% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the consensus among reviewers being that the movie’s visual eye candy “isn’t enough to offset a storyline made up of various sci-fi/fantasy tropes.”
Snyder has admitted that his movies are “always very polarising,” so he is already anticipating the reaction to his director’s cuts of Rebel Moon because, in his own words, they are “a different kettle of fish” and include “all the gore and the hard R-ness and the nudity and the violence and crazy s**t” that initially got left out.
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver are currently streaming on Netflix, with the director’s cuts releasing this summer.
Adele Ankers-Range is a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on X/Twitter @AdeleAnkers.
