VICTORIOUS ON VIDEO

When New Line Cinema had its first research screening of “Wedding Crashers” last fall, the studio knew it had a potential hit on its hands.

The madcap romantic comedy, which stars Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as a pair of lovable rogues who get their kicks from partying at strangers’ weddings, got a resoundingly enthusiastic reception from a theater full of young moviegoers.

One of the studio’s only concerns about the film, which arrives in theaters Friday, was its rating.

Director David Dobkin was contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 movie, largely because R-rated comedies today rarely perform as well as PG-13 films.

But when the audience filled out a research survey after the screening, most of the scenes they checked off as their favorites – including one featuring a furtive sexual act performed under the table at a formal family dinner – clearly put the movie into R-rated territory.

And when members of an audience focus group were asked what rating they thought the movie should have, it was not exactly a hung jury.

“Twenty out of 20 people said they wanted the film to be rated R,” Dobkin recalls. “After that, New Line never raised the issue again. The scenes people liked the best were the R-rated ones.”

New Line’s decision to release a potential summer comedy blockbuster with an R rating has raised eyebrows at rival studios – and with good reason.

In recent years, thanks to political and demographic pressures, the R rating has been in a precipitous decline. Since 1999, when R-rated movies made up 41 percent of all releases, the R-rated business has dropped 30 percent, while PG and PG-13 films have risen considerably.

The drop in R-rated movies has been especially dramatic since Hollywood chieftains were hauled before Congress in September 2000 following the release of a scathing Federal Trade Commission report accusing entertainment companies of cynically marketing R-rated movies to children.

Even though Congress has moved on to more pressing issues, many of the studios’ self-imposed marketing restrictions remain – notably that R-rated movies can’t be advertised on TV before 9 p.m. “Wedding Crashers,” for example, was able to advertise on “The MTV Movie Awards” only in a segment of the show that aired after 9.

According to data compiled by Exhibitor Relations Co., since the 2000 congressional hearings, 15 comedies have made more than $115 million at the box office. Only one, “American Pie 2,” had an R rating.

Last year was an especially miserable year for R-rated comedies. “Eurotrip,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” and “Team America: World Police” all were box-office disappointments, with only “Team America” making more than $20 million in its theatrical release.

Studio marketers say the R rating puts them at a clear disadvantage. Many exhibitors are reluctant to play trailers for an R-rated movie in front of a PG-13 film. Even worse, R-rated humor is verboten in TV commercials, so it’s impossible to show a film’s raunchiest scenes on TV.

Despite these restrictions, the R-rated comedy is beginning to make a comeback. “Wedding Crashers” will be followed in August by “Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,” with Rob Schneider, and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” starring Steve Carell. More R-rated comedies are due early next year.

The reasons for this mini-comeback are simple. In recent years, the real action in the movie business has shifted from theatrical box-office to DVD sales, which now make up more than 60 percent of studio revenues. And one of the hottest profit centers is a new genre devoted to raunchy “unrated” DVD versions of R-rated films.

The unrated versions of such R-rated comedies as “Bad Santa,” “Harold & Kumar” and the “American Pie” series accounted for nearly 90 percent of their video sales.

When New Line released its unrated “Harold & Kumar” DVD earlier this year, the package showed the film’s stars superimposed on a naked female body, the woman’s breasts coyly obscured by an “extreme unrated” sign. 20th Century Fox’s unrated version of “The Girl Next Door” has Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a porn star in the film, seemingly naked, her torso covered by brown paper wrap.

Disney’s unrated version of “Bad Santa,” which comes with a racy hot tub scene that didn’t make the original film, is called “Badder Santa.”

This unlikely boom in raunchy videos has been made possible by the fact that the Motion Picture Association of America, which rigorously regulates the ratings of theatrical films (and, just as important, their trailers and TV spots), has taken a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach to the video marketplace.

Former MPAA chief Jack Valenti, who still oversees the ratings board, has said that as long as the packaging is honest, he has no problem with unrated movies. Apparently the same goes with Wal-Mart, which has long refused to carry hip-hop CDs with parental advisory warnings but now happily stocks unrated DVDs, at least as long as they are assured by studios that the videos would be rated R if they had received a rating.

When his studio was debating whether to greenlight “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” says Universal Studios Home Entertainment chief Craig Kornblau, “I was jumping up and down, going on about how well it could perform. I’m telling our theatrical (production executives), ‘Whatever your box-office results are, we’ll outperform it on our end.’ “

In fact, all of those R-rated comedies that underperformed at the box office last year were big hits in their DVD release.

Kornblau says the “American Pie” DVDs, largely on the strength of sales from unrated videos, are the biggest-selling home-video franchise in the studio’s history. “American Wedding,” the third installment in the series, had a 20-minute “bachelor party sequence” that was scripted specifically for the unrated DVD.

As Kornblau puts it: “It’s really hard to have an unrated (version of a) PG-13 film. In home video, it’s a huge marketing advantage to have an R-rated movie.”

It’s always possible that some moralist may someday try to put the kibosh on this new pot of gold, shocked by the presence of a naked girl in a shower or a puppet sex scene (one of the additions to the unrated “Team America” DVD).

But the studios now have a great card to play. In order to get Congress to stiffen penalties against piracy, they agreed to legislation that allows businesses to market family-friendly censorship devices like ClearPlay, which allow skittish parents to edit sex, violence or bad language out of their DVDs.

Having embraced ClearPlay, studios can spiritedly defend this new generation of unrated videos, saying that if some parents have the right to defang saucy movies, why can’t others enjoy a little extra sex or violence in an unrated version?

In the long run, thanks to the arrival of an assortment of new technology, most of these ratings issues will probably lose most of their relevance.

The studios already have quietly found ways to disseminate R-rated marketing material across the Internet. Soon kids will be watching hi-def movie trailers on their 3G cellphones. It won’t be long before they’ll be seeing the movies themselves on some kind of hand-held video device.

Unless the studios feel heat from Washington, most of these areas will remain outside the enforcement capabilities of the MPAA’s ratings board.

Despite New Line’s jitters about marketing “Wedding Crashers,” you can bet the studio will make its money back selling an unrated DVD of the movie. In America, if something is forbidden fruit, you’ll always find plenty of people eager to take a bite out of the apple.