What would you say to the suggestion that there’s actually less sex on the big screen these days than there was 15 or 20 years ago? Personally, I was pretty skeptical when I came across that assertion in the March 22 issue of Entertainment Weekly.
Week in and week out, I review movies for Plugged In that have all kinds of sexual content. And with each year, it seems as if sexual imagery and ideas and innuendo are seeping into movies of almost all ratings (save, perhaps, the very few G-rated kids flicks that get released these days). Sometimes it’s in your face. Other times, it’s a sly double entendre that a parent might get even if a youngster wouldn’t. But it’s there.
Still, EW writer Adam Markovitz argues in his article “Where’s the Love?” that scenes actually depicting two stars making love are increasingly rare these days. Furthermore, he says it’s a trend that’s been underway for since the late 1990s.
Markovitz writes,
The first love seen you saw in a movie is hard to forget. But what’s hard to remember these days is the last time any of us saw one on screen. Not just a sexy moment, but a bona fide hot, unironic, don’t-watch-it-with-your-parents love scene between big stars in a big Hollywood movie. You definitely didn’t see one in any of last year’s nine Best Picture Oscar nominees, which featured characters getting killed, saved, sick, and angry—but never, under any circumstances, lucky.
By Markovitz’s reckoning, just one of last year’s top-tier earners at the box office featured such a scene. “In a year when TV shows like HBO’s Girls and Showtime’s Homeland had more pants-down action than a urologist’s office,” he says, “only one out of the 25 highest-grossing movies had a genuine roll in the hay: The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1.”
Markovitz is quick to admit that plenty of onscreen flesh still gets flashed in hard-R comedies like The Hangover and Superbad, as well as in lower-budget indie fare like The Sessions or The Reader. But those looking for similarly steamy stuff in big-budget, wide-release movies are less likely to find it there compared to 15 or 20 years ago, and Markovitz offers several hypotheses for this trend.
First, sultry sex just doesn’t pay. Movies with that kind of content will likely garner a more restrictive rating, one that necessarily limits a film’s audience among potential teen viewers. And, increasingly, that’s the market Hollywood is pursuing. “Now that young people drive the box office, if your film can handle a PG-13 storywise, then there is no reason to go to an R, because you’re just limiting the number of people who can see it,” says The Vow director Michael Sucsy in the article.
Second, explicit sexual imagery is readily available online—making it less “necessary” in movies. “Thanks to the Internet,” Markovitz writes, “sexual images and videos are never more than a click away, which makes audiences less eager to rush to a theater to see them, and also more critical about context when they do.”
Finally, illicit or explicit sex can’t be used as effectively in marketing materials as a well-placed scene of apocalyptic devastation can be. Vincent Bruzzese, president of the film division of Ipsos (a media marketing firm), observes, “Putting a shower scene in a trailer is not going to drive people to the theater for an opening weekend. Blowing up a city will.”
So does all that add up to less sex in the kinds of big-budget blockbusters teens are likely to see? If we accept Markovitz’s analysis at face value here, it would seem that might be the case.
Still, that hardly means there’s less sexual content on the whole available to those who are looking for it. It simply means that the market has driven it to other outlets—namely R-rated fare, the Internet and premium cable outlets such as HBO and Showtime.
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