How much do Gen Z and Gen Alpha care about seeing sex on-screen at the cinema? According to Anyone But You and One Night Only (read our review here) filmmaker Will Gluck, not much. While speaking with Variety about his new film, One Night Only, which follows two individuals on the one night a year when premarital sex is legal, Gluck explained that its rules are complicated, and that newer generations aren’t concerned about seeing actors get busy on-screen.
High Concepts and Head-Scratching Rules
“You can’t really describe this movie,” Gluck says. “[The cast] goes on talk shows and spends 80% of the time explaining the rules of the world, and that’s not what the movie is about. We have to just let people see it. That’s the best tool we have, especially for something that’s this crazy.”
Even for a high-concept premise, I have plenty of questions about how those rules actually play out on screen. However, I doubt I’ll get any satisfactory answers unless I talk to people who’ve actually seen it. There are too many ins and outs (heh) in a story about sexual activity getting monitored by the government. At some point, you need to let your brain go and enjoy the ride. Don’t sweat the small stuff, they say.
Why Younger Audiences Are Tuning Out On-Screen Sex
When Variety brought up recent studies showing that Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t want to see sex on screen, Gluck acknowledged it’s a real factor: “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.”
An Elder Millennial Enters the Chat
While I’m an elder millennial, I can relate to Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s opinions about sex on screen in movies. If I’m being honest, sex scenes in modern movies do almost nothing for me. Hollywood has a habit of turning what should be a clumsy, human experience into an overly polished, sensationalized spectacle, a hyper-choreographed tangle of limbs that feels less like intimacy and more like a mandatory check on a studio checklist. Unless the sex is genuinely driving the character or plot, it just feels like filler. We have the internet for that now; if I’m at the theater, I’m paying for the story.
How do you feel about sex in Hollywood productions? Do you miss seeing actors go at it as they did in the ’80s and ’90s? Does a movie about sex need to have graphic sex in it? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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