The sexiest movie of the year not having any actual sex isn’t an outlier.
Analyst Stephen Follows examined the 250 highest-grossing live-action films in America for every year since 2000, and what he found was “that the level of sexual content in films has fallen by almost 40 percent,” according to The Economist. “In 2000 less than 20 percent of the highest-grossing movies had no sexual content at all. Today almost half lack it.”
Maybe 2023 being a strong year for sexual content (defined as sex and nudity) on the big screen with Poor Things, No Hard Feelings, Saltburn, Passages, even Oppenheimer will convince studios to be less prude. Then again…
The fate of the sex scene rests with the next generation. That does not bode well: Generation Z is notoriously chaste. Not only are youngsters having less sex than their elders did, but they also want to see less of it on screen, according to a poll conducted last year by the Centre for Scholars and Storytellers at University of California, Los Angeles. Asked to rank 19 topics they enjoyed watching in TV shows and movies, adolescents put “romance and/or sex” 13th; seventh was “content that doesn’t include sex or romance”. The future, it seems, may be PG-13.
Hmm, I wonder what happened in the early 2000s, what genre of movie suddenly becoming popular, made movies so sexless.
(Via The Economist)