In 2022, the MPA gave Brandon Cronenberg (David’s son) four options for his Infinity Pool: NC-17 rating, or the Not Rated route, formally appeal the NC-17, or edit it down to R.
What followed was months of trimming, swapping, obscuring and negotiating, all in the hopes that an edited version would change the MPA verdict.
This eventually resulted in a slightly different, R-rated version showing up in theaters in early 2023, shortly after the Not Rated version had wowed critics at Sundance Fest. The total time off of the movie is probably like five seconds, not a very big difference at all.
The issue in question? Skarsgård’s character, James, ejaculating at the beach after a handjob by Mia Goth’s freewheeling Gabi.
The dual versions of Infinity Pool — and questions about which one would end up on VOD, streaming media — generated discussion.
In 2021, the release of porn industry-themed drama Pleasure got delayed because A24, the initial distributor of the Not Rated version, dropped the film after requesting R-rated cut from first-time Swedish director Ninja Thyberg.
Neon commitedt to stand by the Not Rated cut alone. “I’m happy and relieved that my debut and life’s work is in the hands of Neon who dared launching the film with my original vision, raw and uncut, to the American audience,” Thyberg said.
Pleasure is available on freemium service Tubi, and the version is missing content from the theatrical cut. Even though Neon stuck by Thyberg’s “raw and uncut” vision from the March 2022 U.S. release until the July 2022 video release, an alternate version was cut, which obtained R rating from MPA.
Lionsgate’s erotic thriller The Housemaid toned down some overly erotic moments. A comparison with the version available concurrently on PPOV showed the omission of Sidney Sweeney’s partial nudity in the steamy scenes that helped turn Paul Feig’s rebooting of the 1990s erotic thriller into one of the year’s megahits.
Compared to the 1990s — when studios had to worry about theatrical, home video, cable and broadcast — the distribution model in 2026 seems much more confusing and chaotic.
In the 1990s, there were several core versions of each title, and mostly physical. Now, even if there are still only a few differently rated versions, the same title could result in 40 to over a hundred distinct versions for other reasons, and most are delivered digitally.
There are still a similar number of theatrical cuts (delivered as multiple Digital Cinema Packages, or DCPs), but also several television versions (multiple frame rates, ratios, etc.), home video versions (standard and for collector markets), international versions, airline and speciality versions, versions with different levels of accessibility, plus several others.
In the early 2000, Utah-based Clean Flix offered wholesome edited versions of popular feature films for conservative audiences, removing anything they deemed unacceptable. Many prominent directors — including Spielberg and Redford — and studios like Disney, Sony, Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox, sued Clean Flix for copyright infringement, and the company folded in 2006.
In the current streaming era, things are unclear and chaotic. Netflix showed for several years the 2-D version of Gaspar Noé’s 2015 sexually explicit 3-D dramedy Love. The unrated film–showing unsimulated full penetration and ejaculation– streamed from 2017 until 2020.
But after the controversy surrounding the French coming-of-age drama Cuties, it seems unlikely Netflix would risk streaming anything as explicit as Noé’s Love now.
Over at Disney+, the streamer had quietly decided to remove an entire minute from the 1971 action classic The French Connection, plus a plot-significant instance of the protagonist Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) using the n-word. The sanitized version was apparently also delivered to the Criterion Channel, to the chagrin of its cinephile audience.
