Rate a Trailer

Welcome to our interactive ‘Rate a Trailer’ resource. Here you can view a trailer and compare your own thoughts and analysis about a trailer’s age rating to those of the BBFC Compliance Officers who actually rated the content.

Here are some points to consider before you get started:

Trailers are marketing tools created by a film distributor to entice audiences to go and see their film at the cinema. As a result, sometimes trailers can feel tonally different to the film they’re promoting, and they may not always be rated the same as the movie they’re advertising. For example, it’s quite possible to have a 12A rated trailer for a film rated 18. So, if you’re rating a trailer for a film that you already know the age rating for, don’t assume it will be rated the same!

Although we use the same classification guidelines to rate movie trailers as we do feature films and episodic content, we do tend to be a little bit more cautious when rating trailers. This is because when audiences go to the cinema, they’re making an active decision about what they’re going to see. This decision is often based on expectations that they may have about a particular genre, star or franchise. In contrast, audiences have no choice about the accompanying trailers (the film exhibitors make that decision) which may be very different in tone and content to the film the audience is choosing to watch. Additionally, because trailers are short and self-contained, content issues that may be on the borderline between two age rating categories are less likely to be justified by the surrounding narrative context and, therefore, may be more likely to cause upset or offence.