9 things I learned from the BBFC 2025 annual report

Long-time readers of this blog will know I have an "inside baseball" obsession with film classification. I’m fascinated by film classification, especially BBFC ratings, why films are rated what they are, and decisions that were the source of contention. For me, the release of the BBFC’s annual report is like Christmas; the ultimate chance to indulge my inner film nerd.

Back when I was doing my PhD, and then when I had started my job in Finance, I went on a generational run of reading and summarizing my key takeaways from the Annual Reports from 2016 to 2019. But then my job got very busy, and my actuarial exams got more difficult, forcing my niche hobby onto the back burner, leaving the 2020 through 2024 reports unchronicled.

Being on maternity leave, I can now right some of those wrongs, and thus, for the first time in six years, have the time to pore over the 2025 Annual Report, and tell you what I found interesting! Below are nine things that I learned from reading the 2025 annual report.

1. Complaints for non-standard reasons I

The section of the Annual Report that attracts most attention from BBFC nerds, is the complaints section, because this reveals the temperature of the British public, not just in regards to their pressure points in terms of film content, but broader societal issues as well.

8 Lessons Learned from the 2019 BBFC Annual Report

The blog is rated 15 for strong sex references and drug references.

On Thursday, the BBFC dropped their 2019 Annual Report, which for film classification nerds, is also known as 'Most Complained about Films to the BBFC Day'. I spent Friday evening poring through the report, looking for clues and new information, and psycho-analysing every adjective used in the report. In short, I was in heaven.

Here were eight prominent things I noticed from reading it:

01. Emma knows her BBFC…

Tale as old as time… that the first point I make every year when discussing the BBFC annual report, is not an observation, but rather, a shameless display of braggadocio. The three most complained about films in 2019 were Joker, The Favourite and John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, and I'd predicted all three of these in my prognostication blog.

Written in black and white

This blog is rated 12A for infrequent strong language.

Last week, in preparation for watching Octavia Spencer get her Gone Girl on in Ma, I watched Black or White. The film itself was extremely forgettable, with aspirations of Oscar glory but not enough quality to realise those dreams, but the thing that did stick out about the film, to me, was this line:

The BBFC have stated in previous podcasts that the 'MF word' is considered a 15-rated term. It's why Eat Pray Love, a PG-rated film in every other sense, was 15.

8 Things I Learned from the 2018 BBFC Annual Report

This blog is rated 15 for references to violence, sexual violence, and bragging from the author.

The 2018 BBFC Annual Report actually came out a bit earlier this year than we're used to; last year's report dropped on July 19th, whereas 2018's one came almost two month's earlier. However, so switched on are my BBFC-senses that I seemed to anticipate this, as I wrote my prediction blog a few weeks ago!

So, as per tradition for the past three years (2015 et 2016 et 2017), here were some notable points I took when devouring the report!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

This was also one of my takeaways from last year's report, and I'm aware it's a bit self-aggrandising to bring it up again, but it's not like me to self-promote, now is it? 😏

In my anticipation blog, I correctly called that Red Sparrow would be the most complained-about film of 2018, followed by Peter Rabbit, Show Dogs, A Northern Soul and Ready Player One. I even correctly predicted that Love, Simon's trailer would get the BBFC complaints.

Second-guessing which films got the BBFC the most complaints in 2018

Every July, comes Christmas time for film classification nerds, when the BBFC drop their annual report. We love to pore over the report, read between the lines at the BBFC’s evasions and obfuscations, and the PDF enriches our appreciation of film classification, whilst teaching us a thing or two about film overall.

As my Oscar predictions show, I’m somewhat keen on predicting film-related things. Thus, using my experiences of the 2018 UK releases I’ve watched, my observations from how people have interacted with the BBFC Twitter account, and word of mouth from others, here be the 2018 UK releases that I think got the BBFC the most feedback last year. Point of clarification: by '2018 UK releases', I refer to films that came out in UK cinemas in 2018. Something like The Favourite, which had a 2018 US release date, came out here in 2019, so wouldn’t count. You can expect to see complaints for that in 2019's BBFC annual report!

01. Red Sparrow

Jennifer Lawrence is wooden af

The Consistency Act

This blog is rated 15 for infrequent strong sex references.

The new Fionn Whitehead film, The Children Act, is one of those curious cases where the film is rated 12A in Britain and Ireland, yet got an R in America.

Sharp Objects gets rated 18 by the BBFC

I finished reading Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects this week. The book has been turned into an 8-part HBO miniseries, and although I’m yet to watch it, it had very much been on my radar due to the expert way it had been marketed: ‘From the director of Big Little Lies, from the producers of Get Out, from the author of Gone Girl, and starring Amy Adams’. Any semi-cineliterate individual will know that that is a killer recipe for success.

‘Killer’ being the operative word. The plot revolves around a journalist, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), who returns to her stifling Missouri hometown to investigate the disappearance of two young girls in the town. Having a tonne of baggage herself, including strained relationships with her frosty mother, the investigation causes Camille to revisit some of her demons, including the death of her beloved sister Marian, a death she never got over.

Inbetween a 15 and an 18

This blog is rated 15 for strong sex references.

Every year, I like to analyse the BBFC short insight for a film, before I’ve even seen it. Last year, I nerded out to the BBFCinsight for Dunkirk, as it was an unprecedented case of four different adjectives for each of its classification issues.

The year before, I was excited because Suicide Squad got a 15, which is really unusual for a big studio superhero movie. Funnily enough, Suicide Squad’s short insight is actually subsumed in Dunkirk’s, ‘sustained threat, intense sequences, moderate violence, strong language’, yet Dunkirk is a rating lower.

Tangential, but Dunkirk has Harry Styles (a singer-turned-actor) and Suicide Squad has Cara Delevingne (a model-turned-cocaine addict). They used to ‘date’ each other. I daresay one was substantially more successful at acting than the other.

2018’s bout of ‘Emma critiquing the BBFCinsight of a film having not even seen the movie’ comes for the upcoming The Festival. For this film, Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, the creators of The Inbetweeners, collaborate again, as director and producers, respectively.

The Death of Specificity

This blog is rated 15 for infrequent very strong language and strong sex references.

The Death of Stalin, Armando Iannucci’s razor-sharp historical satire, explores the power struggles that unfold immediately after Joseph Stalin dies from a stroke, with hilarious consequences.

10 Lessons Learned from the 2017 BBFC Annual Report

I’ve waited long and hard, but Christmas for Emma has arrived! The BBFC Annual Report for 2017 dropped today, and here are the ten main takeaways I got from consuming it!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

Just as I’d predicted in my anticipation blog, the film which got the most complaints to the BBFC last year was Logan. 

Battle of the Sex Scenes

This blog is rated 12A for moderate sex references.

Despite the BBFC constantly palming me off with less-than-satisfactory templated e-mails of little substance whenever I pose them a query, I always seem to come back for more.

Perhaps this is because my brain is so film classification-geared, that I’m hungry to have movie discourse of any kind, and the BBFC did act on my Call Me by Your Name e-mail earlier this year, showing that they are receptive to suggestions, once in a blue moon.

My most recent e-mail to them was about Battle of the Sexes, rated 12A for infrequent moderate sex. The oh-so-informative extended insight reads:

In one scene, two women have sex; however, there is no strong detail.

My attempt at writing a BBFC report for BEAST (2018)

It was William Shakespeare who remarked ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, and with regards to that quote in many walks of life (for example, intolerable guys who’s arrogance would make Gaston from Beauty and the Beast appear modest droning on about how oh-so-clever they are for having passed their CFA exams), The Bard was not wrong.

This is not just a photoshoot. This is an M&S photoshoot.

Happy Hump Day, readers! The World Cup starts tomorrow, and I am officially pumped.

Despite me supporting France in the 2018 World Cup as I did in the 2016 Euros (with my second teams being South Korea, Japan and Croatia), and me following the England national team with the same emotional whiplashing (not-so-subtle plug of a sick Miles Teller film, there) of love and hate that I had for them in the 2016 Euros (because of that racist Vardy), I will of course be keeping a beady eye on the exploits of my national team. How can I not, when Gary Baehill is in the squad?

The team had their official photoshoot yesterday, kitted out in a rather dapper, and more than a little tight Marks and Spencer three-piece-suits:

Couple thoughts on this photo:

Second-guessing the films that the BBFC got the most complaints in 2017

This blog is rated 15 for references to child abuse and strong sex references.

The BBFC drop their Annual Reports around July every year, where they discuss all facets of their guidelines and the film classification process in the UK. I await these reports with the same eagerness I await the Oscars with, and I think it's fun to try and predict which titles cause the BBFC the most complaints every year!

15 rated films with male-to-female usages of the c-word

This blog is rated 15 for implied very strong language and descriptions of domestic violence and brutality.

About twice a year, I’ll curiosity-watch a film purely because Mark Kermode has gone in on it in his reviews. Last year, I watched Ron Howard’s The Dilemma for this precise reason, and Kermode was right; it was a tonal mess with jokes that went down like a lead balloon.

A rude gesture at the MCU

This blog is rated 12A for implied strong language and references to violence and torture.

Those with a passing interest in British film certification will have noticed that they’ve recently adopted a new turn of phrase as part of their catalogue of film ratings reasons: ‘rude gesture’.

It’s been flagged for several films, including Pacific Rim Uprising, Rampage and Walk with Me. The former two are 12A and the latter is a PG, which suggests to me the BBFC can’t quite decide if using the middle finger is a 12A or PG-rated offence.

Love, Emma

This is a BBFC-ccentric blog. In the great tradition of the BBFC, I will now preface articles on film ratings with a film rating (how meta, eh?).

This entry would be rated 12A for references to murder, sexual threat, racist behaviour and snide digs at certain druggie actresses.

-- 

Midnight Sun, a film which I have no interest in seeing (it stars that meth-head Bella Thorne (for future reference, just so you know, whenever I refer to ‘Meth-head’, I’m talking about Bella Thorne, and ‘Cokehead’ is Cara Delevingne), recently got handed a rather interesting BBFC insight.

It is rated 12A purely for ‘underage drinking’.

The extended insight reads:

There are scenes glamorising alcohol use in which teenagers, including some who are underage, attend a party where they play drinking games and do shots.

Seems a pretty draconic reason to hand out a 12A certificate, no? The actual 12A rating itself I’m not going to quibble with too much, as it got PG-13 in the States and 12A in Ireland, so it’s probable that the BBFC just didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb by giving it a PG rating.

But at least Ireland came up with a semi-plausible reason for their 12A, citing ‘moderate sex references’. By giving a film a 12A purely for underage drinking, the BBFC have opened up an unwelcome can of worms, a can of worms which BBFC pedants like me are quick to catch on to.

See, Love, Simon, another 12A-rated film, also contains a party scene where the characters (who are in High School, and thus underage), drank alcohol. Yet Love, Simon is rated 12A for ‘infrequent strong language, moderate sex references’, with no mention of the underage drinking in the extended insight or short insight.

Two film rating observations regarding Wes Anderson films

Being as big a BBFC nerd as I am can be an affliction sometimes. It means that, for purposes of BBFC research, I end up watching titles that I would not watch otherwise (Fairy Tale – Dragon Cry, Red Sparrow, etc), and not particularly enjoying the experience.

Isle of Dogs was another example of such film. It wasn’t a bad film at all, but Wes Anderson is just not to my taste, and I didn’t feel like the film had enough of a sense of jeopardy regarding the dogs' mission, to keep me gripped.

Fun with chalk and blackboards at the Odeon Covent Garden.

The Odeon Covent Garden has always had terrific film introduction game. Usually, a screen is devoted to one film only, but I've noticed they've recently mixed it up a bit more, so there's more variety in the films they show.

Here are two introductions that tickled me, whether it be for the font, wording used, or in the latter case, the creative way they squeezed five film titles onto one board!

Of course, this BBFC nerd's eye was drawn to how, coincidentally, all five of these films were 15-rated! Although one of them really ought not to be.

Very helpful (not)

This blog post is rated 15 for references to sexual violence and torture.

The BBFC replied to my e-mail on Red Sparrow, and in doing so, reminded me why it is I don’t usually bother e-mailing them. The Call Me By Your Name thing was a fluke; I forgot how obstinate and obtuse these people are when they want to be or have accepted a bung from 20th Century Fox.

Don’t be fooled by the length; like Jamie Redknapp’s punditry, they have used a lot of words which ultimately say very little.

1) The BBFC are in the business of re-writing film history to suit their agendas.