Director Will Gluck admitted something shocking in the promotion for his new film, "One Night Only."
The movie is a variation on the "Purge" series. That film allowed murder to be legal for one day a year. "One Night Only's" gimmick? Citizens can have premarital sex only one day out of 365.
Now, imagine the visuals that suggests. Gluck sure did, and then he had serious second thoughts.
The veteran filmmaker shared why his film, featuring the attractive leads Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, has so little sex. His research says audiences of all ages cringe at cinematic sex scenes.
The answer is 100% yes. I went through this on two movies. I have long pages of empirical data about it. The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody. Now it’s more of a private, intimate thing that people don’t want to see when they’re in a shared experience. Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a big theater, they get uncomfortable.
He also removed copious nudity from the finished print. What happened next? "One Night Only" flopped.
The film earned just $5.5 million in its debut frame. The rom-com is expected to drop roughly 60 percent in its second weekend.
Word of mouth is doing little to save the movie.
Now, let's consider Gluck's last rom-com. The 2023 film "Anyone But You" also featured two attractive stars — Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell — and featured them in very little clothing in multiple scenes. That film opened modestly, too — only $6 million. Then word-of-mouth marketing kicked in.
Bigly.
The film went on to earn a whopping $88 million in U.S. theaters.
It's an interesting comparison, but movies fail for all sorts of reasons. Maybe a rom-com meets "The Purge" pitch was doomed from the start. One thing is clear. Today's mainstream movies aren't as saucy as they were 30-plus years ago.
Hollywood delivered a crush of sexually charged movies in the late 1980s through the early '90s. Here's just a sample.
- "Basic Instinct" (1992)
- "9 1/2 Weeks" (1986)
- "Sea of Love" (1989)
- "Fatal Attraction" (1987)
- "Wild Orchid" (1989)
- "Sliver" (1993)
- "The Hot Spot" (1990)
- "Body of Evidence" (1993)
The films boasted A-list stars and plenty of heat (and skin). That trend hasn't had a Hollywood sequel. Can we blame the rise of the Internet, a landscape offering all the lurid visuals we could ever demand? Or has the industry internalized the woke Left's "male gaze," removing sexuality from screens large and small as a result?
Either way, we're still obsessed with stars like Sweeney and her choice in jeans.
The late, great screenwriter William Goldman had the perfect phrase to describe Hollywood. It's as true today as when he originally said it.
Fair. But whoever coined the phrase, "sex sells" was onto something, too. Trends come and go, but our basic instincts remain unchanged.
