For years now, film fans have been complaining about the lack of sex in movies. As writer RS Benedict perfectly put it in the essay, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” Marvel movies in particular feature people with idealized, perfect bodies, but no signs of sexual desire. “Even when they have sex, no one is horny,” writes Benedict. “No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else.” Several others have echoed Benedict’s sentiments, most recently, director Zack Snyder, who told Variety, “Sex in movies is weirdly gone. I don’t understand it.” Snyder continued to pitch a way to bring sex back to movies, “Now, we need an NC-17 movie that’s a hit… If we had an erotic thriller that was NC-17 and it was in IMAX and everyone had to just go do it, maybe that would lift the stigma.”In a vacuum, that sounds like a good idea. Who wouldn’t like to see an underrepresented genre get a big Hollywood spectacle that resonates with the public? But once you start to look even a little into the history of sex in cinema, it’s easy to see that not only is Snyder’s take inaccurate about moviegoers of the past, he doesn’t even seem to understand people who go to movies today.cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});Sex, Silents, and the CodeSurprising to those who think of the past as a simpler, more virtuous time, sex has always been a part of moving pictures. Bathing scenes occurred in Georges Méliès 1897 short After the Ball and in 1899’s Le Coucher de la Mariée by Eugène Pirou and director Albert Kirchner. Nudity and sexuality remained part of the medium as the studio system developed, in Theda Bara’s sultry performance in 1917’s Cleopatra (or so we’re told, that movie’s long-since lost), D. W. Griffith’s 1921 melodrama Orphans of the Storm, and in the 1927 Oscar winner Wings. Even the biblical epic The Sign of the Cross by Cecil B. DeMille featured a Roman orgy, upsetting decency groups while doing huge box office numbers.The Sign of the Cross was one of the movies that drove the studio heads to devise their own censorship and moral oversight board, taking action themselves instead of letting regional censors carve up their films or waiting for Washington to draft legislation. These steps eventually led to the Motion Picture Production Code a.k.a. the Hays Code, the list of moral regulations to which all American film needed to adhere to receive nationwide distribution.Despite the fact that the code completely outlawed “any licentious or suggestive nudity—in fact or in silhouette,” the movies produced under the Hays Code’s enforcement, from 1934 to 1954, count among some of Hollywood’s sexiest entries. Men leered at ankles, women winked at the camera, and directors cut to trains going through tunnels or exploding fireworks to ensure that audiences understood just what the characters were doing. The way that Lauren Bacall coos instructions for whistling (“just put your lips together and blow”) to Humphrey Bogart in 1944’s To Have and Have Not bristles with more sexual energy than you’d find in most pornographic films.After the Fall of HaysWhen the code came to an end in the 1950s, new genres and technologies brought sex back to the screen: exploitation and Mondo films, art movies from around the world, and the American New Hollywood movement regularly included scenes of nudity and sex. To be sure, audiences responded favorably to these films. The X-Rated (a precursor rating to today’s NC-17) Midnight Cowboy (1969) won an Academy Award, and academics and socialites even went to see the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat.In the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular, sexuality on screen had a renaissance, especially in the erotic drama and thriller genre. Fatal Attraction (1987), Basic Instinct (1992), and Indecent Proposal (1993) all made big money at the box office and became topics of mainstream conversation. Moreover, sexuality was common to other genres. You couldn’t watch an action movie without seeing Sylvester Stallone or Jean-Claude Van Damme getting it on with his leading lady, and matinée stars Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner often showed their tushes on screen.Yet, these movies were part of a larger tapestry, and movie-going audiences also went to see Disney features like The Little Mermaid (1989) and The Lion King (1994), family movies like Home Alone (1990) and Apollo 13 (1995), alongside countless legal thrillers, chaste rom-coms, and utterly sexless Steven Spielberg entries. Despite what Snyder seems to be saying in his conversation with Variety, erotic thrillers weren’t the biggest thing at the movies, even when they were at their height.Sex and SensibilitiesSnyder’s right about one thing: for a time, sex did seem to vanish from cinemas. However, he and others at the time (including, to be fair, this writer) confused correlation with causation on this point. Throughout the mid-2000s and the 2010s, superhero movies dominated the box office. However, no one would say that their popularity stemmed from the fact that they largely lacked sexual content. Instead, it’s more accurate to say that sex disappeared from movies because, basically, everything but superheroes disappeared from the screen, and superheroes didn’t have sex.At this point, we have to note that not only did Zack Snyder rise to prominence during the superhero boom, but that he did indeed mix sex with tights and capes. However, no one would use the word “erotic” to describe the “Hallelujah” sequence from Watchmen or the scene from Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in which a fully-clothed Clark Kent jumps into the tub with Lois Lane. Those were sex scenes, yes, but poorly done sex scenes.The quality of filmmaking accounts for the other big knock against the assumption that modern moviegoers dislike sex: there has, in fact, been a lot of sex in modern movies. And people don’t complain about the sex, because the movies are extremely well done. Two years ago, Anora, an A24 movie about a sex worker, cleaned up at the Academy Awards. A year before, Oppenheimer, which includes several nude scenes with Florence Pugh and Cillian Murphy, did just as well. The biggest movie story of 2026 is Obsession, a movie that isn’t erotic in any way, but is about sex. Two of the year’s best films, The Invite and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, deal directly with sexuality. Heck, even the two biggest blockbusters of the year, The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, contain more believable passion than anything in Snyder’s oeuvre.In short, sex and sensuality are in fact back at the movies, and people are turning out to see them. They just want to see sexuality and sensuality as part of a well-made movie, not as an end to itself.Sex In Standard FormatsTo be clear, none of this means that we shouldn’t have blockbuster erotic thrillers. That’s a fun trashy genre, and cinema should explore sexuality as much as it does any other part of the human experience. And if an erotic thriller proves to be a big box office hit, all the better.It’s just that Snyder’s understanding of the history of sexuality in movies seems a little underdeveloped, as does his assumptions about what people want to see. After all, there has been exactly one feature film shot entirely in IMAX, and it took Christopher Nolan adapting an indisputable literary masterpiece to make it happen. We’re not likely to see a lot more fully-IMAX movies of any genre soon, no matter how much people actually like sex on screen.Instead, we’ll just have to watch sex and sensuality in regular ol’ movies in standard formats… just like moviegoers have been doing since movies were invented.The post Zack Snyder Is Overestimating the Movie-Going Public’s Desire for Erotic Thrillers appeared first on Den of Geek.