Marvel’s Wolverine ESRB rating warns players about “exposed buttocks”

Marvel’s Wolverine picked up its ESRB rating this week, and buried in all the gore was a note about exposed buttocks.

The news comes after Insomniac spent months selling this game on brutality, from the dismemberment in June’s State of Play through to the July trailer that introduced Lady Deathstrike, so nobody expected the ratings board to go easy on it. What nobody expected was which body part the board would feel obliged to warn people about.

What the Marvel’s Wolverine ESRB rating actually says

The board handed the game an M for Mature 17+, which it justified with blood and gore, drug reference, intense violence, partial nudity, and strong language, and the summary reads like a butcher’s inventory as a result.

Yet the detail everyone seized on arrives after the limbs and the screaming, because the board closed with this: “A handful of sequences briefly depict a character’s exposed buttocks.”

Insomniac Games

Nobody said whose, though we’d put our money on Logan on the grounds that the comics keep stripping him down and turning him feral for outfits like Canada’s Department H.

Live-action has form here too, since Hugh Jackman refused a modesty sock on X-Men Origins: Wolverine because filming it felt “just like college,” which prompted director Gavin Hood to wrap the shoot by handing him a bag of every frame that got snipped out. By Deadpool & Wolverine, Shawn Levy was angling shots purely to showcase what a cut punchline called “Canada’s Ass.”

Days of Future Past then came with a bright green sock so the effects team could erase anything unfortunate, though Jackman pointed out it drew rather more attention than less. And by Deadpool & Wolverine, Shawn Levy was angling shots purely to showcase what a cut punchline called “Canada’s Ass.”

Marvel’s Wolverine arrives on PS5 on September 15, set in a corner of the Marvel universe where the X-Men don’t exist at all. Team X does, and at least one member is evidently going commando.