No more nudity or lovemaking in Hollywood

Hollywood films are increasingly choosing not to show nudity or lovemaking. Here’s why...
Back in the ’80s and ’90s, when, judging by Bollywood, flowers got way more action than humans in India did, and a hero and heroine running around trees was largely understood by the Indian audience as code for ‘they’re doing it’, Hollywood was a lot less subtle about shoving lovemaking or woman-stripping-down-to-underwear scenes into every film – whether it was a romcom or a film about Tom Cruise saving the world or even one that was about a bunch of people drowning on a ship.The script demanded it, the audience demanded it, and – judging by host Seth MacFarlane’s ‘boob song’ at this year’s Oscars, that detailed how a row of Oscar winning actresses bared their chest in movies they won their Oscar for – the critics demanded it too!
Bizarrely, 2012-13 has seen a role reversal of sorts between the two industries. While sex scenes are turning out to be major crowd pullers in desi theatres (besides still keeping Bhatt sahab in business), a recent market report commissioned by Warner Bros has revealed that more and more US studios, on the other hand, are choosing not to have their protagonists strip/consummate on screen because, apparently, sex doesn’t sell anymore. Your reaction to this may be ‘whaaat?’, and rightly so, because according to the report, “one of the last big steamy moments to heat up cinema screens and score big box-office figures was the intimate in-car moment between Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in 1997’s Titanic.” That was sixteen years ago! So, what happened?
Sex doesn’t sell, superheroes do
Judging by the summer’s biggest blockbusters, the world needs lesser sex scenes, and more of the Avengers superheroes and those space-alien-robots from the Transformers series. And more animated/CGI characters certainly wouldn’t hurt. Just sample 2012’s biggest Hollywood hits worldwide:
The Avengers – $1,511,757,910
Skyfall – $1,108,561,013
The Dark Knight Rises – $1,084,439,099
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – $1,017,003,568
Ice Age: Continental Drift – $877,244,782
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 – $829,224,737
The Amazing Spider-Man – $752,216,557
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted – $742,110,251
The Hunger Games – $691,247,768
Men in Black 3 – $624,026,776
As film research expert Vincent Bruzzese said in a recent interview, “Sex scenes used to be written, no matter the plot, to spice up a trailer. But all that does today is get a film an Adults-only rating and lose a younger audience. Today, such scenes are written out by producers even before they are shot. They ask: do we really need the sex? Can we fill the space with dazzling special effects instead and keep the family rating?”
As per some stats provided by The Sun, a decade ago, 120 films given an ‘R’ (restricted) rating broke into the US box office top 10. Last year, there were only 80. And the report says most of these movies were certified ‘R’ because of violence, and not sex. In fact, only one out of the 25 highest-grossing movies – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 – had any getting-it-on sequence worth talking about.
Adrian Lyne, director of the mega-erotic films Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful too told Entertainment Weekly, “Would Fatal Attraction get made at a studio today? Not in a thousand years. I can’t think of the last relationship piece that was a success – I’m not sure the studios even make them anymore. Which is apparently why I haven’t done something for quite a while now.”
Also, offending women is no longer such a good idea
According to the report, it is women who form a major part of the movie-going audience, and “they find gratuitous sex scenes that don’t fit the plot a major turn-off”. Recently, Alice Eve randomly and unnecessarily stripping to her underwear in Star Trek Into Darkness was deemed so offensive that its writer Damon Lindelof actually took to Twitter to apologise to his fans, saying, “We should have done a better job of not being gratuitous in our representation of a barely clothed actress.” Director JJ Abrams too admitted in an interview, “Some people see it as exploiting her (Eve), and while she is lovely, I can also see their point of view.”
The critics aren’t a big fan of sex anymore
There was a time when besides Holocaust movies, films containing graphic nudity were considered a soft spot for Academy voters. Halle Berry’s sex scene in Monster’s Ball was as much talked about as her acting; same goes for Kate Winslet’s derriere in The Reader. While hosting the Oscars in 2011, Anne Hathaway had joked about how she didn’t receive a nomination for her movie Love And Other Drugs despite getting naked in it, while the kind of PR the lesbian scene in Black Swan generated for Natalie Portman could only have helped her bid to win the gold statuette.But this time around, Jennifer Lawrence, who won an Oscar for Silver Linings Playbook, didn’t have a single sex scene throughout the movie – and this, despite playing the role of a sex addict in it!
If we look at Bollywood though, Vidya Balan’s ooh-la-la act in The Dirty Picture had critics throwing awards at her feet.
Also...
The no-nudity clause is really, really expensive
Did you know Halle Berry was paid an additional $500,000 to flash her breasts briefly in Swordfish? The Telegraph points out, “Buying a Hollywood actress out of her no-nudity clause is an expensive business (a single bared breast will cost more than a fireball-spewing winged cyber dragon, voiced by Harrison Ford, and get fewer hits on YouTube).”
Besides... people have ready access to porn
“You can’t just put gratuitous T&A into movies anymore, like a steamy shower-sex scene out of nowhere. Those scenes are never rated highly by test audiences unless it’s part of the plot. Moviegoers will say, ‘Why am I going to pay to see that when I can google it?’,” says adds Bruzzese. Oddly, sex scenes are making quite a graphic comeback on US television, on shows like Girls, Game Of Thrones and Homeland, which are a favourite with audiences and critics alike.