I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember.

It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.)

This seems absurd.

I have way less problem with some light cursing/petting than films that are ostensibly for kids like cartoons and superhero movies that treat mass existential threat as an incident plot point in the hero’s journey.

Like:

• Frozen 2 in which the entire city is almost destroyed by a tidal wave
• the recent Superman movie in which the city actually is destroyed, and although it is reconstructed we never hear about the people crushed by debris etc.

Superman is rated PG-13 in the US, 12A in the UK. There’s off-screen loss of life but on-screen is widespread in movies: death with barely any emotional weight.

(a) I’m sure this lack of emotional weight in existential jeopardy is harmful to us.

(b) I’m sure that existential jeopardy in movies is getting more frequent; jeopardy inflation if you like.

(c) It is SO LAZY.

Look at Ferris Bueller: the jeopardy is a car with too many miles on the clock, and Ferris running to get home in time. My kid was on the edge of her seat.

But it takes effort and careful storytelling to set up jeopardy like this. We have to understand Cameron and his relationships and the car’s place in those, and we have to care about Cameron, and we have to feel the stakes, and the ominous arrival of the knowledge… If you were dropped into the movie 20 minutes from the end, you wouldn’t have that setup, it wouldn’t matter.

WHEREAS: death is death, its weight is universal.

So I can see how it flies through production meetings of hurried people. It’s an easy yes.

I am aware this smacks a bit of “oh films were different in my day, you didn’t need all this cursing and violence”…

So I checked.

(This is the joy of AI, you can cross-check your whims.)

I got ChatGPT to develop a jeopardy scoring methodology and here’s what it came up with, from low to high:

1 – Personal or social: embarrassment, exposure, rejection, career failure, losing a competition

2 – Family or bounded community: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

3 – Mortal but local: custody, home, livelihood, family separation, collapse of a small group

4 – Collective catastrophe: mass death; destruction or subjugation of a city, nation, population or people

5 – Existential catastrophe: extinction, civilisation, planet, universe, timeline or reality

So Ferris Bueller would be a “1” whereas Frozen 2 would be a “4.”

Then I got it to look up the top 10 films at the box office in north American each year for the last 50 years.

Then score all 500 films according to the main narrative jeopardy. (I assumed that knowledge would be in the training data seeing as these are popular movies.)

If you’re interested, [download the movie jeopardy spreadsheet here(/more/2026/07/film_jeopardy_1976_2025-by-chatgpt.xlsx)] (xlsx).

Finally I got ChatGPT to calculate the average per decade.

Here’s the results in the format:

Period: average jeopardy score (% low jeopardy movies – % high jeopardy movies)

• 1976-79: 2.77 (43% low – 35% high)
• 1980s: 2.83 (43% low – 31% high)
• 1990s: 3.21 (28% – 46% high)
• 2000s: 3.61 (24% low – 60% high)
• 2010s: 3.96 (10% low – 72% high)
• 2020-2025: 4.08 (7% low – 73% high)

i.e. I am not imagining this.

There has been considerable jeopardy inflation in movies between the 1980s and today.

So I think this is harmful to us all.

Death, as it is used in these movies, is not jeopardy but a symbol of jeopardy. That’s part of it being used lazily.

But we should put MASSIVE weight on death and calamity!

Because it’s a big deal! Especially violent death and collective danger.

And when we don’t give it weight, it gets assumed as part of the normal order of things. Which it is not.

One argument is: look Matt, these are cartoon deaths. It’s a superhero movie, it’s fantasy, it doesn’t matter, we know how to look past the lack of weight.

But all video are merely patterns of light on the screen; I don’t think we get to say that one matters more than another; they all occupy the exact same level of “remove” in our minds, and it all matters the same.

If something deserves weight when we see it on the TV news, it deserves weight when we see it in a movie.

Or else we carry the lack of weight when we see it in movies over to the TV news, and then it carries over to the real people depicted.

I always wonder what creates the consensus cosmogony for an era – our collective understanding of how the world works and in particular where we are going.

It was sci-fi in the 1950s (that’s the argument in the link above).

Now I would argue that we have identified at least a tributary of the 2020s consensus:

When we are all exposed to media that normalises death and mass threat, there is something in the psyche that kicks in…

When something built into your sense of reality isn’t happening, you work to make it happen.

Am I saying that we are deliberately, collectively creating situations of mass threat and emotionless jeopardy, because we see it in the movies and it isn’t happening in real life?

Yes. Unconsciously but yes.

So we need to find new collective futures, I’ve talked about that before. That’s a big lift.

But I would start by giving the events in movies the weight they deserve, so they don’t get normalised. We’d all be happier for it.

And that means I would start with the ratings systems.

Ferris Bueller, for all the cursing and kissing, is a movie for kids, give it a G.

Frozen 2 should be rated R.