How we decide the age for each movie
We don’t copy the official rating. We look at what happens in the movie: whether it’s scary, whether someone dies, whether there’s fighting, whether the pace is frantic. Then we check the age makes sense.
In one minute
Three AI models read the movie’s details
Each one separately suggests an age, the scene that decides it and the warnings. They don’t see the official rating or the score.
They are combined
We take the average of the three.
They are adjusted with a hand-made list
A parent rated 89 movies they know well by hand. We use that list to correct the AI’s tendency to over- or under-shoot.
We round up
If it comes out at 6.5, we say 7. When in doubt, we’d rather wait a year.
Is it right?
are within one year of the hand-made list.
come out 2 or more years too low. That is the error we worry about most (you putting on something too strong), and we track it separately.
average error.
Measured with cross-validation (5 × 10): the AI is never scored on movies used in the adjustment. It is 89 movies, so the figures have a margin of about ±8 points.
To understand it better
What we look at
- Scary scenes
- Frightening villains, monsters, transformations or jump scares.
- Death or separation
- Someone loved dies or disappears, often a parent.
- Fighting or violence
- Punches, weapons, injuries; slapstick barely counts.
- Difficult themes
- War, bullying, illness, broken families, hard real events.
- Very intense pace
- Noise, loud music and fast editing; can overexcite little ones.
- Hard to follow
- Time jumps, double meanings or context that goes over their heads at this age.
- Romance or sexual content
- From lingering kisses to innuendo.
- Swearing
- Bad language or insults.
- Alcohol, tobacco or drugs
- Even in passing.
- Risky behaviour
- Things a child might try to copy.
- Stereotypes
- Stereotypes of their time, unchallenged.
The most demanding thing decides: one very strong scene weighs more than ten mild ones.
What each age means
| Age | What to expect | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | No villains or threats; gentle pace | My Neighbor Totoro |
| 4 | Very brief tension, resolved straight away | Ponyo |
| 5–6 | A fairy-tale villain, occasional scares, a loss handled gently | Finding Nemo |
| 7–8 | A loved one dies on screen; dark atmosphere or long danger | The Lion King (1994) |
| 9–10 | Real fear even in fantasy; war or trauma in the background | Jumanji (1995) |
| 11–12 | Moderate threat and violence; war or persecution at the core | The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas |
| 13+ | We don’t recommend it under 13 | — |
The examples are movies on our list with high confidence.
Why we don’t use the official rating
A Spanish “7” or an American “PG” lumps very different movies together. In our tests, movies with the same label ranged, according to the parent who made the list, from age 3 to 12:
| Official label | Movies | Ages in the hand-made list |
|---|---|---|
| FSK 0 (Alemania / Germany) | 43 | 3–10 |
| FSK 6 | 31 | 3–12 |
| FSK 12 | 10 | 7–12 |
| BBFC U (Reino Unido / UK) | 38 | 3–8 |
| BBFC PG | 41 | 3–12 |
We only use the official rating to decide which movies enter the catalogue (those suitable up to age 10, according to the median of 14 countries) and to audit. We never show it to the models, and we don’t show it on the site.
What the AI gets wrong
The AI hasn’t watched the movies: it works from the synopsis, the keywords and what it “knows” about them. With little-known movies it is less accurate; that’s why we show the confidence.
The three models (Claude Haiku, Sonnet and Opus) come from the same company, Anthropic, so they can share mistakes. The hand-made list is our check, and it is small: it has few movies above age 8 and none “not recommended”.
The models may also remember ages from American guides they have read; those guides weigh swearing more and fear less than we do.
Your child is not an average
Every child handles fear differently. If yours is sensitive, look at the warnings more than at the number.
Confidence
- High confidence (1,561): the three models are within a year and none says it knows little about the movie.
- Medium confidence (2,111): they broadly agree.
- Low confidence: approximate age (3,179): they differ by 3 years or more, two of them know little about the movie, or one says “not recommended” and another 8 or under.
Human review
The 3,179 movies with low confidence are labelled “approximate age”. There is a manual review queue with the 300 that matter most (on subscription services in Spain and most watched), and that review is still pending: we don’t pretend it has happened. Meanwhile, those pages are not offered to search engines.
Mistakes
If you see an age that doesn’t fit, tell us from the movie page (“Does the age look right?”) or write to hola@openfamilytoolbox.com. Those answers are used to recalibrate the ages.