The first word on The Wolfman, starring the hirsute Benicio Del Toro as the murderous beast of yore, was that it was essentially a “re-imagining” of The Wolf Man, the 1941 monster movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. 
Scary for its time, it’s hard to imagine that the Universal horror classic, shot in black and white, would earn a rating more restrictive than PG these days. And it’s doubtful that anyone under about 10 would find it frightening.
So I was a bit shocked to discover that the new tale of Lawrence Talbot’s fateful trek to the Old Country, directed by Joe Johnston (Jurassic Park III, Jumanji), is being released as an R-rated movie.
Won’t that rating successfully cut out a potentially huge audience segment — adolescent to young-teen boys, and maybe some girls — and thus hurt the movie’s earnings? Families aren’t likely to come out for the movie, either.
And conventional wisdom has it that R-rated movies typically do far worse than PG-13 movies at the box-office. Ten out of 10 of the last decade’s top earners, including the graphically violent The Dark Knight, were rated PG-13. The Return of the King, the final film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, topped the list.
On the other hand, several R-rated movies have done big business in recent years, including 2009’s The Hangover and 2005’s Wedding Crashers, and, more to the point, ultra-violent “torture porn” like the “Saw” series and its ilk.
That latter trend likely had the biggest impact on The Wolfman being released with an R rating: Horror fans, the chief target of the Wolfman ad campaign, apparently want their shocks delivered with gory violence — gushing blood, and lots of it. Or they won’t bother to come.
And reportedly, that bloodlust will be satiated, at least according to one viewer who caught an early screening in Austin: “He is incredibly savage and basically eviscerates and mutilates with glee. There are some particularly gruesome sequences, some more realistic than others.”
That’s sad, in a way. And it doesn’t reflect the reality of the ginormous box-office success of last year’s Paranormal Activity, which delivered its big shocks with practically no blood at all.
Will The Wolfman, snagged by delays and reportedly beset by production difficulties, be worth howling about? I’ll find out tonight