Steven Soderbergh, the director behind thriller movie Oceans 11 and disaster movie Contagion, aired his grievances with the most maligned but profitable genre in Hollywood, superhero films. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Soderbergh was asked if he’d like to return to franchise work.
“Not really,” he answered. “I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way. It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller. I’m just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don’t exist [laughs].”
The Magic Mike director then said he struggles to relate to the sexless world of the genre. “For a lot of these, for me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters—apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers—there’s no fucking,” he laughed. “Nobody’s fucking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing.”
Soderbergh’s not wrong about the superhero genre being pretty sexless. Most of these action movies are more focused on the exhibition of spectacle than pure exhibitionism, but things are changing.
Eternals recently made history as the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to feature a sex scene. We say sex scene, it was about as erotic as two action figures being mashed together, but it was something.
Sexlessness isn’t just an issue in superhero movies, though. It’s something that’s infected a lot of modern blockbusters, most of which are pretty chaste these days. A piece by The Guardian broke down the reason for the death of the sex scene, and it’s got less to do with a new wave of prudishness in Hollywood and more to do with the bottom line.
Basically, if you put a sex scene in your movie, you’re more likely to get an R-rating which limits your potential audience and, therefore, your box office. Studios just aren’t willing to take the financial hit to titillate audiences anymore.