Hollywood sex scenes are rapidly declining
While recent films such as Poor Things or Saltburn might suggest the opposite, Hollywood has actually been moving further away from full-frontal as research shows that sex scenes are in decline.
It seems that newer audiences have fallen out of lust with sex scenes. In a 2023 study, it was revealed that almost half of Gen-Z viewers wanted less nudity on their screens.
After surveying 1,500 adolescents between the ages of ten and 24, the Center for Scholars and Storytellers (CSS) at UCL found that the majority of adolescents aged 13-24 (51.5%) wanted to see more content centred around friendships and platonic relationships rather than romantic ones. 47.5% felt that sex was not needed for the plot in most films and TV shows.
That belief has been reflected across Hollywood in recent years. A new study has found that there is almost 40% less sexual content in major films than there was at the start of the millennium.
Commissioned by The Economist, the team gathered the top 250 films from each year since 2000. They found that movies released in 2023 had just over 60% of the sexual content found in the top 250 in 2000. The genre that saw the biggest drop off in explicit scenes was action movies, with 70% having fewer or no intimate scenes in comparison to the start of the decade.
Even romantic movies, where you might assume sex scenes would feel more essential to the plot or be a key trope of the genre, saw a decline. While it was the smallest change, there was still an under 20% drop.
As films like Saltburn, Poor Things or All Of Us Strangers dominated recent box offices, all with plenty of nudity and explicit scenes, it’s easy to believe the opposite is true. Those movies seem to suggest that the audience’s desire for sex scenes is thriving or could be seeing a resurgence.
However, it was in the realm of the biggest box office smashes that these declining stats were the starkest. The percentage of top-grossing films with no sexual content at all jumped massively, from about 18% in 2000 to 46% in 2023. The study concluded that “the biggest driver of this reduction in sexual content” came from the biggest and most successful films.
So not only are there generally fewer sex scenes, but when they are there, they’re concentrated in a small fraction of films. This means that while Poor Things had plenty of explicit scenes, it was using up a fair amount of the pie chart Hollywood is now settling into.
There are plenty of reasons or suggestions as to why this might be happening. It could be that filmmakers are mirroring the thoughts of Gen-Z and beginning to believe that sex scenes aren’t necessary. It could be that the rise of intimacy coaches and more concern surrounding the actor’s well-being has meant more uncomfortable scenes are cut. On the other hand, it could all be down to protecting the profits and holding back the explicit content to ensure a smooth release with a broad, lucrative age range.
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