While those were due to content that parents felt was too violently graphic for a PG rating, but the Motion Picture Association of America didn’t see going all the way to the R-rated level, profanity eventually became the battleground of what was still in the family realm and what wasn’t.
So Ready Player One’s manner of playing to the format and formula of the rating is kind of funny, when you think about how Steven Spielberg indirectly had a hand in its inception.
It was movie history when the PG-13 rating was introduced, and both Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom (which he directed) and Gremlins (which he produced) are credited as sparking the origins of the cautionary grade.