This Is the Highest-Grossing R-Rated Movie of All Time

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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R-rated movies were officially described as “Restricted–Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian. Contains some adult material. Parents are urged to learn more about the film before taking their young children with them.” These films still are less likely to draw large audiences because much of the movie-going population is likely to avoid them.

The current rating system for movies was put into place in 1968 and slightly changed two years later. The goal was similar to earlier rating systems for the movie industry. Some content was not appropriate for any movies shown to the general public. Other content was appropriate based on age and parental decisions. The 1968 system relied on parental judgment more than any other single factor.

24/7 Tempo has picked the R-rated movie with the biggest box office sales. Dramas, action films and comedies were equally represented in the mix we considered, with a few sci-fi and romance films added. Theater traffic for R-rated fare is obviously growing. Of the 50 movies on a list of finalists for the distinction of highest-grossing R-rated films, only 12 are from the 20th century. The rest were released in 2000 or later.

To pick the R-rated film with the biggest box office, 24/7 Tempo considered 3,891 R-rated movies with box office data from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Production budgets also came from The Numbers. Principle cast and genre for each movie come from the Internet Movie Database, an online movie database owned by Amazon.
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The highest-grossing R-rated movie is “The Passion of the Christ,” released in 2004. It had a domestic box office of $370.8 million and a production budget of $25 million. Directed by Mel Gibson, it starred Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci, Maia Morgenstern and Christo Jivkov.

Click here to see all the highest-grossing R-rated movies of all time.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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