Sexy movies are a hard sell to Gen Z. Can Poor Things change that?

While speaking with reporters about his film Poor Things earlier this fall, director Yorgos Lanthimos took a moment to address the spicy elephant in the room.

"Why is there no sex in movies anymore?" the Greek filmmaker wondered. He was being somewhat facetious — his latest feature stars Emma Stone as a dead Victorian woman who, after being brought back to life by a mad scientist, sets forth on her journey toward sexual liberation. 

The story is funny, the nudity is plentiful — and per Stone, who was also a producer on the film — the sex scenes serve the story "in such an important way."

Lanthimos' film — and his qualms — come just as a recent study from UCLA found that a good chunk of Gen Z just doesn't really want to see sex in TV and movies anymore.

Of young people surveyed between the ages of 13 to 24, 47.5 per cent think sex isn't needed for plot development in TV shows and movies. (Pause here for collective gasp.)

Meanwhile, movie critics and filmmakers are increasingly bemoaning that mainstream film has become sexless — or at the very least, prudish in its portrayal of sex.

A 2019 report in Playboy used IMDB data to conclude that the 2010s saw the fewest sex scenes on screen since the 1960s. It should be noted that the Hays Code era — a period of Hollywood censorship that forbade the depiction of sex in cinema, along with other taboos — lasted from 1934 until 1968.

Critics and filmmakers shared their theories as to why the younger generation might be rejecting sexy cinema and why depicting sex on screen is important.

Gabrielle Drolet, a culture writer and cartoonist in Montreal who is in her mid-twenties, said it's "so common to see sex depicted in a way that feels really frivolous."

"I'm thinking of shows like Euphoria, or to name another Sam Levinson show, The Idol, where there were so many sex scenes [that] were so gratuitous and grotesque, almost, and unnecessary."

But she noted that dismissing all sex scenes would mean that "we're missing out on a pretty big part of the human experience and how people experience their relationships."

Drolet was surprised to see the strong reaction provoked by a sex scene in Christopher Nolan's blockbuster Oppenheimer this summer.

The scene set the internet aflame (or rather, gave it a cold shower), as some viewers mocked it for showing the nuclear physicist rather morbidly reciting to his lover the line from Hindu scripture's the Gita that he later became associated with: Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.

"It's really common to see violent scenes," said Drolet. "But as soon as sex comes up, that becomes a really big complicated issue, whereas we're so desensitized to everything else."