R Rated Opening / Film

Films is the Trope Namer. The writers would use the trope just in case parents thought that this film is for kids. Sure, movies are easy to watch, but if your kids are sensitive, wait for them until they’re older.

Film — Animated

• The Animatrix is fairly dark and fairly violent throughout, but the very first short starts with an erotic sparring match and the second one is full of gruesome murders and the occasional maiming.
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters starts with some singing concessions cheerfully asking you not to expose yourself indecently. And then more food appears and belts out a violent heavy metal song threatening to kill you if you interrupt or redistribute the film, as part of a parody of "Let's All Go to the Lobby", a drive-in movie trailer.
• Batman: Gotham by Gaslight opens with a striptease by Ivy in nothing but strategically placed leaves just to make sure you realize this isn't a kid's movie.
• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm opens with a crook being beat up by Batman, and then being killed by an unrelated figure. It was only a PG film, but since it was made in the 90s...
• Batman: Under the Red Hood opens with The Joker beating Jason Todd with in an inch of his life with a crowbar, mocking him as he lies in a pool of his own blood, and then leaving him to die in an explosion. This film was also rated PG-13.
• Green Lantern: First Flight starts with Abin Sur bleeding to death from a stomach wound. It has quite a few dark moments after that.
  • And Green Lantern: Emerald Knights started with shadow constructs ripping a Lantern apart on screen. Yikes.
• Justice League: The New Frontier opens with the painter/author of the apocalyptic book committing suicide (from a first-person point of view, for bonus viewing pleasure). In case anyone missed the pre-credits opening, the story proper begins with Technical Pacifist Hal Jordan being forced to shoot a man in the face in self-defense and sinking into a blood-splattered Heroic BSoD as the scene fades out. By the way, the suicidal author was (an extremely thinly veiled) Dr. Seuss. Just in case him killing himself didn't do it for you.
• Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge begins with Hanzo Hasashi (not yet having become the undead revenant known as Scorpion) having to fight a mess of ninjas out to murder him and his son Satoshi, and he dispatches each of the ninjas in brutal and bloody fashion.
• Just in case you still weren't convinced that Sausage Party deserved its R rating, the very first line of spoken dialogue begins with "Shit", and is followed up with a Crosses the Line Twice musical number including more swearing, sexual innuendo, and Nazis.
• Inverted with South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, in which the opening musical number, "Mountain Town" is a cheery, upbeat song with only the mildest of profanity. Then "Uncle Fucka" starts, and it all goes downhill from there.
• The second scene of Serbian animated film Technotise Edit I Ja features two characters discussing robotic prostitutes.
• The Transformers: The Movie opens with the mass genocide of an entire planet save one survivor (who gets eaten alive later on anyway) before the opening credits, and then just barely five minutes after that it shows several beloved characters from the TV series getting Killed Off for Real with brutal blaster shots tearing through their bodies, culminating in Megatron blowing Ironhide's head up (barely off-screen) with a cannon shot as the Autobot futilely grabs at his legs. Similar in the case of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm though, it just received a PG rating since it was made in the 80's.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie: The opening minutes to the film are a lot more darker than the rest of the film (which was rated Y7 by the TV Parental Guidelines), with Future Leonardo visibly bleeding from an injury, a Precision F-Strike in him referring to Future Michelangelo as a "badass mystic warrior", and both turtles dying onscreen with Future Leo in particular being disintegrated.
• The Triplets of Belleville got a PG-13 rating entirely because of the opening scene, which features a topless dancer. This doesn't seem to have been intentional, however — the creators were French, and in their commentary, seem genuinely surprised and confused that one brief topless scene would be enough to bump up the rating all by itself, which says a lot about how America is uptight about sexuality and nudity (especially if it has to do with women) while France and most of Western Europe is okay with it within reason ("within reason" meaning "so long as it's not accompanied by violence or has children involved").
• The opening for Wonder Woman featured Hippolyta performing an on-screen decapitation. The writers commented that they were only able to keep their PG-13 rating because it was done in silhouette.
• The opening scenes of Watership Down probably served as an inspiration for Happy Tree Friends. The film actually is a kid's film, just a very, very violent one.

Film — Live-Action

• The 2014 remake of About Last Night... opens with Bernie (Kevin Hart) discussing the one night stand he had the previous night and how great the girl was at blow jobs.
• All About E: In the very first scene, E's making out with another woman, with this turning into sex very quickly.
• The Romanian film Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn has an X-rated opening, as the main character and her husband make a sex tape (Which is shown on-screen, explicit and uncensored). With the exception of an alternate ending where the heroine's harshest critics are forced to simulate oral sex on a dildo, the rest of the movie doesn't feature so much as a bra strap (though there is plenty of discussion of sex, as the main plot involves the tape being released and the heroine's job being endangered because of it).
• Basic Instinct starts with a man being tied up and a beautiful naked woman having sex with him, a scene of eroticism which turns to horror as she stabs him to death with an icepick mid-sex.
• The Beast of Yucca Flats opens with an R-Rated BLAM: A nameless woman goes topless, getting ready for bed, and is immediately strangled by an unknown assailant. After a not-so-subtle implication that the assailant will rape her corpse, the movie cuts to the main plot and the murder is never mentioned.
• Before the Devil Knows You're Dead opens with a graphic 30-second sex scene.
• Below Her Mouth: The film opens on Dallas and Joslyn having sex at length.
• Bloody Mama's opening scene has a teenage Kate being held down by her brothers while her father rapes her.
• Bodies Bodies Bodies: It's downplayed, but while making out with Bee in the very first scene, Sophie explictly rubs between her legs (albeit with both of them fully clothed).
• Cannibal! The Musical: The name should probably have got you, but in case you're mistaking musicals as always family-friendly, there's the gory murder of an entire crew to start the movie. Then we go to the Oklahoma!-like next scene...
• About two minutes into Coming to America is a scene with two topless female royal attendants bathing the protagonist (Eddie Murphy's character). Ironically, the rest of the film is tamer.
• Compulsion (2016): The very first scene is of Sadie having sex with Thierry while he chokes her (which she'd asked him to) and she's topless.
• The 2011 Conan the Barbarian (2011) film gives us a unique first view of the character: In the womb...during a C-Section, which starts when his mother is stabbed in the stomach during battle.
• Cube opens with a gruesome death trap sprung on a hapless prisoner.
• Drive-Away Dolls: A man is murdered pretty soon after the film opens. Then the very next scene features two women having sex fairly explicitly.
• Eloïse's Lover: Inverted. The very last shot prior to the credits is of Àsia swimming entirely naked.
• The novel The Fellowship of the Ring opens with a happy birthday party in the happy land of happy Hobbits with a happy fireworks show. The movie version, opening (as it did) right in the heat of Harry Potter fever (and very shortly after the release of the first, much more kid-friendly Potter movie), gives fair warning by opening with a flashback to the fall of Sauron—with thousands of bloodthirsty orc warriors, thousands of scarily kick-ass elves in armor, and one seriously scary great big Dark Lord. Kids, when the Balrog finally shows up, don't say you weren't warned.
• Forbidden Love: The Unashamed Stories of Lesbian Lives: Inverted. The film ends with a sex scene between Laura and Mitch, the lesbians from the pulp story.
• Four Weddings and a Funeral starts with the main character exclaiming "fuck" ''repeatedly'' because he's woken up to find he's late for a wedding. The fact that it's Hugh Grant saying it softens it up a bit though.
• Subverted for laughs in George of the Jungle, where an opening scene features a jungle guide taking a fall that would be lethal... before he's shown bandaged up but safe, as the narrator assures us that this is actually a Denser and Wackier movie:
  "Don't worry — nobody dies in this story. They just get really big boo-boos!"
• GoodFellas opens with Henry, Tommy and Jimmy driving into a forest while swearing their heads off, and then opening up the trunk to reveal a bloodied, half-dead fellow mobster, before Tommy and Jimmy subsequently stab and shoot him several times.
• Hardbodies opens with credits over a scene moving around to show of the contents of a room, with someone singing a quick nonsensical syllables like "Badadoobeda Hmmaha" until the view scrolls back to show a man on top of a very attractive woman having vigorous sex with her while under a blanket, the syllables being sung match the tempo of his thrusts until the singing finishes at the moment he does, then showing him rolling off her. Both are apparently very pleased.
• Hardcore Henry's opening has Henry's father calling him a pussy and then credits showing a violent montage of Henry's victims set to "Let Me Down Easy" by The Stranglers.
• The Hills Have Eyes 2 opens with a scene of a tortured, naked woman giving birth to a mutant. Notably, one movie theater got in trouble when someone accidentally put in the wrong reel in a room meant to play the kid-friendly The Last Mimzy: since it's the first scene in the movie, there was no time for someone to notice that the wrong film was playing and stop it before the kids saw the graphic content.
• The Jack Ass films tend to start off with a relatively tame stunt before they get into the more crude type stunts (although “Number Two” did push it by having the following stunt be a snake biting Chris Pontius’ penis while it’s dressed as a mouse). However, “Jackass Forever” is the exception because it starts off with a giant Kaiju monster battle where the monster is revealed to be none other that Chris Pontius’ penis and testicles colored green and dressed like a lizard, which attacks the city by shooting out semen, and is defeated when a snapping turtle bites it.
• Jagged Mind: Billie is shown making out with Christine in the very first scene, then going down on her once they fall into bed (though nothing explicit).
• K-9’s opening has two couples indulging in Auto Erotica in a car park on a rainy night where The Protagonist cop is on stakeout. Since they are both fairly explicit and serve no plot purpose the sequence is often cut for television broadcast.
• Kick-Ass starts with a mentally deranged man jumping off a roof in a superhero costume and promptly falling to his death. The very next scene has the main character masturbating to his English teacher. This was likely put there for the benefit of all the people who saw the trailers of kids in superhero costumes and completely ignored the R-rating.
• Kiss Me (2011): The film opens on Mia having sex with her fiance in bed, shot from above with her under him while they do it.
• Curiously inverted by Kung Fu Hustle, which starts with an Establishing Character Moment for the main antagonists, the Axe Gang, by having them viciously murder several people, and includes on-screen dismemberment and the film's only Precision F-Strike. For the rest of the film, this characterization is largely forgotten, as the Axe Gang is mainly played for laughs, with not a hint of the violence shown in the opening. The rest of the movie is silly, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, slapstick martial arts. Cut out the opening scene and the film may have even warranted a mere PG-13 rating.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Doctor Strange has a decapitation (albeit shown only in shadow) within the first two minutes. The movie is PG-13 but it's probably intended as a warning that this is one of the more adult entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and not for little kids.
  • Avengers: Infinity War: The first ten minutes of the film are dark even by its standards, both figuratively and literally. Bodies of dead Asgardian children are on display, and while the camera shies away from showing anything but Heimdall's face as he is stabbed through the chest, Loki is violently and realistically strangled on-screen. The movie is PG-13.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: While not the actual opening scene (which shows a bad wound but is otherwise not particularly worse than any other Marvel movie), the major action scene that truly kicks off the plot features Doctor Strange and Wong fighting a giant one-eyed monster, which Strange defeats with fairly graphic Eye Scream. Still PG-13, but it's billed as a horror movie and the kills only get more gruesome from there.
• Meet the Feebles, a twisted, R-rated parody of The Muppet Show, has a cigarette-smoking rat telling a hippo to "move yer fat ass" and a walrus and cat having sex, all within the first few minutes to make it clear to anyone who mistakenly rented the film for their kids that this is not a puppet movie for the whole family. Just in case the R-rating and cover art depicting a hippo toting a heavy machine gun didn't already tip them off.
• Mortal Kombat (2021) opens with Hanzo Hasashi and most of his family being betrayed and (in true Mortal Kombat fashion) messily slaughtered by Bi-Han (before they would become Scorpion and Sub-Zero respectively).
• MouseHunt opens with the two leads as pallbearers at their father's funeral, squabbling over who's doing a worse job carrying it, with their fighting leading to the coffin getting dropped and the corpse flying out, across town, and into an open manhole. A family comedy, courtesy of Gore Verbinski. Strap in.
• In Muppet Treasure Island, the opening song "Shiver My Timbers" explicitly makes clear what pirates do and ends with the pirate captain murdering his own crew, showing that this may be a Muppets movie, but it will deal with themes not normally considered child-friendly. (The movie later jokes about this, when Rizzo reacts to Billy Bones' death with "He died? And this is supposed to be a kids' movie!")
• Napoleon (2023) begins where Marie-Antoinette's life ends, graphically depicting her death by guillotine and the executor showing the crowd her freshly-decapitated head.
• Pan's Labyrinth seems like a fairly kid-friendly movie, yeah? The story of a Spanish girl, dreaming of a fantasy world that may or may not be real. Pretty cool, right? Well... the opening shot is a character slowly bleeding to death. Then the ten-minute mark, we see two people getting killed very explicitly (Grievous Bottley Harm and gunshot, respectively). That should tip you off about the rest of the film.
• The page image comes from the opening scene of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, in which many people (who are implied to have been somewhat innocent) are executed, including a child small enough that they need to stand on a barrel to reach the noose. The rest of the film actually seems fairly tame compared to this scene.
• Please Give opens on a montage of women receiving mammograms, with breasts fully visible.
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu has one to establish its Darker and Edgier tone, and the first film in the series to be rated PG; opening on a fairly realistic car accident involving Harry Goodman escaping from a rampaging Mewtwo while investigating PCL Labs.
• While it's more PG-13 than R-Rated, Power Rangers (2017) opens with the grim defeat of Zordon and his fellow Rangers - with one dying on-screen - during the age of the dinosaurs. And the second scene features one of Jason's friends realizing he unwittingly gave a bull a handjob (he thought he was milking a female cow), and Jason himself ends up getting into a pretty violent car wreck while trying to evade police. Just in case you thought you were bringing your kids to watch the same kind of wholesome, campy superheroes you watched as a child.
• Reservoir Dogs opens with Mr. Brown explaining that Madonna's "Like A Virgin" is actually being about her getting fucked so much that she can't feel anything until she meets a man who is so well endowed that she feels pain again, like a virgin.
• The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, the raid on Omaha Beach, is famous for the sheer, unflinching brutality involved. It very quickly establishes that this will not be one of those movies that depicts war as clean, glamourous, or in any way desirable. It was so true-to-life, in fact, that actual World War II veterans had to leave the audience because it was triggering flashbacks. The rest of the movie doesn't get better.
• Shiva Baby: The film opens on Danielle having sex loudly on the couch with her sugar daddy Max, though it's not explicit (but does show her topless from the back and side after).
• Small Soldiers, about some toy army guys who come to life, was rated PG-13 and had some swearing in the first scene.
• Stand by Me starts with a grown up Gordie reading upon the death of someone (later revealed to be Chris Chambers) in the front newspaper in the car.
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man starts off with a homeless man cutting open his own thigh and shoving a rusty steel rod into the open wound. Soon after, the wound becomes infested with maggots, leading the man to limp onto a road screaming for help before getting hit by the protagonist's car.
• Each of the films in the Transformers Film Series have had this type of opening to some degree:
  • Transformers opens with Blackout and Scorponok committing a realistic assault on the army base in Qatar.
  • Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen opens with The Fallen brutalizing a prehistoric society, followed immediately by a brutal fight in Shanghai that ends with at least one bloody human death and a Decepticon being shot execution-style by Optimus Prime.
  • Transformers: Dark of the Moon opens with the final battle in the war that devastated Cybertron, with many Autobots and Decepticons being killed. The very next shot after that is a panty shot of Carly.
  • Transformers: Age of Extinction opens with alien warships killing many dinosaurs, and a couple of scenes later Ratchet is killed off by U.S. Government agents with the aid of Lockdown, who then rips out his spark.
  • Transformers: The Last Knight opens with a brutal battle in medieval times, showing many humans being roasted alive by robotic dragons and a Merlin who does most of his magic while drunk; and the present day opening on the derelict neighborhoods of Chicago being heavily-ravaged by the events of the previous films including Transformers being hunted by anti-robot extremists who brutally destroy the robot Canopy.
• Ulvesommer Is a weird case that it's considered a family film in its home Norway, it starts with wolves being shot from a helicopter. It tones down somewhat although it still gets a whole lot crap in (like the Little Miss Badass' mother having sex with the Big Bad in another room, one can hear it but kids will likely not understand). It does apparently have a 16+ rating internationally compared to the homerating of 7+.
• A Walk Among the Tombstones opens with the main character shooting several robbers, followed by the opening credits set over a brutal rape scene.
• Inverted with Who Framed Roger Rabbit which opens with a kid-friendly Denser and Wackier Slapstick 1940s-era cartoon (the film being set in 1947) before the plot showcases the darker, more intense elements of a world where human beings and animated characters co-exist including depictions of profanity, violence, and homicide.
• Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings: When the students are introduced, four of the nine (two couples) are all having sex in rooms opposite each other.
• More recent entries in the X-Men film series have had this sort of opening:
  • The Wolverine begins with the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki, along with several Japanese generals committing suicide and Wolverine getting his skin blasted, setting the darker tone for the movie compared to previous X-Men movies.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past opens with the near future timeline showing that the Sentinels have driven both humans and mutants alike to near-extinction, heavily implying that members of both the X-Men and Brotherhood have died trying to fight them. The opening fight also shows that it takes several mutants to stop just one of them, setting up the stakes of the conflict and how the film is considerably darker than previous entries.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse has a bloodier opening with Apocalypse's followers being killed in contrast to a series known for Bloodless Carnage.
  • The opening credits for Deadpool (2016) has lots of profanity at some points and the first fight scene instantly starts with one of the villains being decapitated, with lots of blood and gore following shortly afterwards. The title character himself lampshades:
    You’re probably thinking, ‘My boyfriend said this was a superhero movie, but this guy in the red suit just turned that other guy into a fucking kebab.’
  • Logan's opening fight scene would never get away with a PG-13. The title character's first line is an F-bomb, and in the fight he severs limbs and skewers his adversary's head with his claws. The small-scale brutality of the fight also establishes that it will be a much more brutal experience than any other film in the series.
  • Deadpool 2's opening scene features Deadpool's attempted suicide by blowing himself up, with the first bit of spoken dialogue being "Fuck Wolverine". The following montage shows Deadpool killing criminals in gruesome fashion. He once again lampshades this:
    I know what you're thinking: 'I'm so glad I left the kiddos at home.' But that's where you'd be wrong. That babysitter of yours is high as fuck right now. And believe it or not, Deadpool 2 is a family film. True story. And every big family film starts with a vicious murder. Bambi, The Lion King, Saw VII...
• Young & Wild: The film opens on Daniela in bed with a guy whom she starts masturbating next to.
• Y tu mamá también seems like it would be a fun buddy Road Trip movie set in Mexico, right? Well, the very first thing you see in the movie is a two-minute sex scene. For those who didn't know anything about the movie outside of the road trip with friends, sex ends up being one of the most important themes of the movie, emphasized by the fact that literally every character is shown doing it.

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