What 'Sausage Party' Had To Cut To Avoid An NC-17 Rating

Sausage Party is a hard-R comedy. Around the time the project was first announced, actor, producer, and co-writer Seth Rogen described it as "an R-rated Pixar-style movie" that's "f***ing filthy" and "really, really, really dirty." Pretty much everyone who has seen the film, including our own Jacob Hall, agrees with Rogen that it truly is one dirty movie. The film is R-rated, but Rogen and all involved had to make some cuts to secure that rating.

Below, learn what was removed to take the Sausage Party rating down to an R instead of an NC-17.

After Jacob saw the film, which he described as "easily one of the dirtiest movies ever made," he wrote: "The final twenty minutes, which were mostly unfinished in this screening, may very well be the stuff of legend. In the Q&A that followed the screening, Rogen, Goldberg, and directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon seemed shocked that the MPAA had already let them get away with an R rating." To get the R rating, some trims — pun intended — were made.

When Rogen appeared on the Howard Stern Show to promote the film, he discussed (mild spoiler alert) the food orgy scene, which he described in 2014 as "one of the filthiest things" he's ever seen in his life. Apparently, the sequence is still quite dirty, but the MPAA took issue with animated food fornicating so explicitly:

There is a very sexually charged scene in the film, there is a pita bread with a scrotum. We probably added six things into the orgy that we were like, 'OK, these are like our sacrificial lambs.'

The first cut presented to the MPAA did receive an NC-17 rating. The ratings' board suggestion for getting an R rating? Shaving the hair off of a pita bread's ballsack:

We digitally shaved the pita bread's ballsack. I wish I could have been there, honestly, because I imagine a very heated debate did occur.

Nonetheless, Rogen still laughed when he was asked if he was surprised by how much raunchiness the MPAA allowed in the R-rated film. Most of those "sacrificial lambs" — what Rogen expected they'd have to cut from the orgy sequence — made it into the finished sequence. Out of the six sacrificial lambs, only "an eighth of one of them" was removed from Sausage Party.

Here's the official synopsis:

Life is good for all the food items that occupy the shelves at the local supermarket. Frank (Seth Rogen) the sausage, Brenda (Kristen Wiig) the hot dog bun, Teresa Taco (Salma Hayek) and Sammy Bagel Jr. (Edward Norton) can't wait to go home with a happy customer. Soon, their world comes crashing down as poor Frank learns the horrifying truth that he will eventually become a meal. After warning his pals about their similar fate, the panicked perishables devise a plan to escape from their human enemies.

Sausage Party opens in theaters August 12th.