QuoteStudios obsessively focused on PG-13 franchises and animation in recent years, but movies like "Challengers" and "Saltburn" show eroticism has returned.
Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in "Challengers," a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. "It's getting hot in here," the hip-hop soundtrack intones, as she closes her eyes and runs her hands through her hair, lost in fantasy. "So take off all your clothes."
The story continues at a motel, where Zendaya, playing a tennis prodigy, begins a ménage à trois with two guys; it fizzles after they become more interested in each other. The plot moves on — to sultry interplay on the hood of a car, in a dorm room, in the back seat of a car, on the wooden slats of a sauna. There is erotic churro eating.
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In the 2000s, however, film companies started to obsessively focus on PG-13 franchises and animation — genres that could play to a global audience and sell merchandise. Studios also wanted to expand into China, where censors do not allow sex scenes. As a result, steamy storytelling began to dwindle on the big screen (except at art house theaters). Premium television picked up the slack.
Sex in mainstream movies was "pretty much gone" by 2019, as Ann Hornaday, chief film critic for The Washington Post, wrote in a column that year. A few months later, Kate Hagen, writing in Playboy magazine, found that only about 1.2 percent of films released between 2010 and 2020 contained an overt sex scene, the lowest decade total since the 1960s. (It peaked in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, that was the decade when pornography started to become available online.)
Now, some filmmakers are pushing back.
Awards season brought "Saltburn," with its arousing-disturbing bathtub scene and Barry Keoghan's twirling, full-frontal finale. "Poor Things" found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel. Christopher Nolan filmed the first sex scenes of his 35-year career for "Oppenheimer." ("More interested in the joys of sex than any recent season I can remember," as Kyle Buchanan, awards columnist for The New York Times, described the crop of contenders in February.)
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