Perhaps sex doesn’t sell — at least not in Hollywood anymore.
Despite recent hits like “Saltburn” and “Poor Things” making a splash with their risqué scenes, sex on the big screen has plummeted nearly 40% since the turn of the century, according to a new study.
From 2000 to 2023, both the overall number of steamy on-screen scenes and the amount of movies containing depictions of actors getting frisky have gone way south,ꦇ the for
Follows compared the level of sex content in tꦦhe 250 top-grossing films of ea🦂ch year since 2000 and found a clear trend.
As tꩵime has passed, moviemakers have put less and less skin-on-skin contact in their films.
And it’s not just that sex scenes are becoming less intense and dirty.
A driving factor is꧒ an increase in the number of top 250 films with no sex at all, the study found.
This reached a peak in 2019 when half of the 250 top-grossing films that year were “squeaky clean” and the amount has only dipped slightly with roughly 46% of last year’s top movies having no sex scenes.
Action and thriller movies have seen the sharpest dips in the amount 𝓰of whoopee-making among movie genres, while romantic films had the smallest decline.
To se🐭e if the virginizing of Hollywood was part of a larger trend in prudish behavior or an anomaly, the study looked at other factors that could bring a film up to a PG-13 or R rating.
But that amount of violence, drug use, and profanities have a more steady stream over the years — with a slight uptick in violence.
Follows offers a number of theories that could explain the downward trend including changes in social norms, global market considerations, and the prevalence of streaming services, or grea🍷ter care for the wellbeing of actors on set.
He also suggested Gen Z’s alleged disinterest in sex, the rise of intimacy coordinators in Hollywood and even online porn — making it easier to get adult content than ever before so movie producers don’t have to worry about fulfilling those needs.