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Bare Breasts Don’t Beget Boffo Box Office
A new analysis of five years of box-office data finds nudity and sexuality do not, on average, increase a film’s profitability or prestige.
Want your movie to make more money? Throw in a gratuitous sex scene. At least, that seems to be the working assumption among certain studio executives, who assume a flash of female flesh will increase the box-office take by attracting young male audiences.
It turns out they haven’t been keeping abreast of the latest research.
“Analyses of 914 films released between 2001 and 2005 indicated that sex and nudity do not, on the average, boost box office performance, earn critical acclaim or win major awards,” reports a new study titled “Sex Doesn’t Sell — Nor Impress.” According to the researchers, sex and nudity were negatively correlated with a film’s net profits from domestic distribution and had no positive impact on a picture’s popularity or prestige according to a wide variety of measures.
“I have yet to see a way of crunching the numbers where sex/nudity has a positive relationship with box office, even controlling for MPAA rating or budget,” reports co-author Anemone Cerridwen, an independent scholar based in Vancouver, British Columbia. “‘Sex sells’ is a myth, at least for this database.”
“When I presented these results at European Science Days this summer, I was struck by how hard it is to overcome preconceptions about the box-office consequences of highly graphic sexual content,” says co-author Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis. “But not all truisms are true.”
“The most the market can apparently handle is PG-13 sexuality, and even there, there may be a loss relative to PG or even G,” he adds. Their paper is published in the November issue of the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts.
Cerridwen and Simonton analyzed “the bulk of the films that were widely distributed in mainstream theaters” during the five-year period, looking at box office performance (domestic and international), critical evaluations and awards. Using criterion established by the Web site Screen It, they calculated the extent of potentially objectionable material, including sex and nudity.
“It is apparent at once that sex doesn’t sell by any of the four box office criteria, including the rough indicator of U.S. net,” the researchers write. (The other criteria are gross receipts for the U.S., U.K. and worldwide.) They add that “the adverse effect of sex is actually greatest for world gross,” which suggests the appetite for sexual content is actually lower outside the U.S.
In addition, they found sex and nudity have a negative relationship with critical evaluations of films (as measured by ratings in DVD guides). “In the case of movie awards,” they add, “sex/nudity does have a small positive correlation with the Golden Globes, an appreciation not shared with the Oscars.” (Insert your own snarky comment about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association here.)
Simonton considers their findings particularly striking in light of the fact that “sex is cheap with respect to production costs. Female actors can be hired for less than male actors, and can be urged (i.e. coerced?) into displaying more sexual nudity/activity; and for various reasons, sex scenes may be less expensive to shoot. And yet, mainstream cinema still can’t get an additional buck out of the practice.”
If and when this lack of a payout comes to the attention of producers, the amount of needless nudity in films may decrease. But that doesn’t mean Hollywood will cease to profit from catering to our ignoble instincts.
“In contrast (to sex and nudity),” the researchers note, “violence tends to have a positive effect on U.S. and world gross. Only the U.K. consumer seems immune to this particular content.”
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Bottom line … I don’t stand on the street corner and oogle at another man’s car … I wouldn’t use another man’s toothbrush .. I don’t grab at another man’s scraps … I also don’t find any pleasure in looking at another man’s wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter flopping her breasts across the screen. I don’t know how else to state it … but thought I’d add a line or two here after I found this article.
I have read the study that this article is referencing and it has some very big and fundamental flaws. First, is the MPAA ratings factor. It uses them as a statistical control. It compares PG-13 and R films against each other instead of taking each rating individually and comparing non-nudity and sexual content (the control) against films with nudity all of the same rating. The problem with the method they use is that since rating effects box office numbers, as they showed in the opening paragraph of the study, and the MPAA itself allegedly rates sexuality (especially aberrational behavior) harder than it does violence. So these two factors have in themselves skewed the box office numbers. The least flawed way of factoring out the flawed MPAA rating system is to compare like rated films. Which by the way no NC-17 film were even looked at in this study. The reason is because they only looked at widely released films in the box office. NC-17 rated films do not get widely released anymore.Also the concluding sentence in the study is very biased in motivation. “In light of these emperical results, we are compelled to ask, ‘Why is sex even there?’” I don’t even know where to begin with giving reason for it because so many reasons exist and are especially contingent on a case by case basis. Please do not consider this study either scientific or reputable for trying to accurately show the financial returns on nudity at the box office.Another factor that was not calculated is the market outside the theater. After all films from Scarface to Fight Club, both noted for the violence, lost money at the box office but have done great and made a lot of money on other formats.
I would say the article is not biased–its purpose was to see if sex sold movie tickets. Answer: it doesn’t. This is all kind of obvious, anyway. If people want to see sex they can use the internet without having to drive to the theater and pay a fortune for it. So rather than adding some viewers and removing others (like commenter #1 and myself), it’s far more strongly removing viewers. This is seemingly confirmed by the fact sex sells even less in the foreign market, where sex and nudity are more readily available. Of course, who knows what the real causation there is. As for other purposes of sex in movies, the study suggests sex doesn’t get good reviews (except from the coveted golden globes). So it’s being added for artistic purposes, but by bad artists? Those reviews do presumably correlate with Commenter #2′s strongly-written films despite their negative box-office performance.
This is article is just a little biased. Not everyone adds sexual content to a film to get more money in the box-office. There are probably an infinite number of artistic reasons to have graphic sexual imagery in a movie, and the most powerful reason would be because sex is NOT a bad thing, it is not a “crude” thing, and it is not a “sinful” thing. These are all completely subjective, societal conceptions of sex, so if we’re talking about assumptions here, there’s a whopper. Sex in itself is nothing but reproduction and giving into material desire. It’s really not much different than eating a burger and fries and pooping out a baby as a result.So when you get down to it scientifically, what is wrong with using sexual imagery in a film if there’s an artistic intent behind it? Nothing.Now if you’re using it to objectify women, I suppose that’s another concern that people will flip out over. I’m gay, and I don’t mind when men are sexualized in films. I don’t feel like sexual objectification is inherently an “evil” thing, considering it’s totally natural and generally harmless if it isn’t in excess. Personally, I prefer to watch 300 with the men scantily clad as they decimate Persian armies. I guess I’m a perv.Conclusion: you really need to account for audience demographics. A similar study would also show that strongly-written films don’t do as well in the box office. Does that mean good writing is useless? No. Box office results are so subjective that no reliable data can be drawn other than: people live by certain cultural and personal values, and those values reflect what movies they’re going to spend their money on. What percentage of human beings are religious and claim to abhor sexual imagery? Hmm…
I agree completely. I’m a 25 year old male and I avoid movie’s with sex/nudity. There are many movies I have not watched for this reason.