'Movies are getting horny again': Why Hollywood is no longer a sex-free zone

For a while, mainstream cinema was seen to be shunning sex and sexuality. But a wave of films, from I Want Your Sex to The Invite, are now exploring it in bold and provocative ways.

Sex on screen. For years it's raged on: are sex scenes "necessary" in movies? Is there enough sex? Or just the wrong kind? For a time, it seemed like every film-maker or actor would be asked about it in interviews. It does not seem coincidental that in a 2019 survey, statistics showed US films contain fewer sex scenes now than they have in the past 50 years. Gen Z are, apparently, having less sex than previous generations. Lots of plausible reasons have been suggested: siloed-off social media addiction, sensitivity to sexual politics, or over-investment in the mass availability of porn online. 

Warning: This article contains language and explicit descriptions of sex acts that some may find offensive.

But now in 2026, might the cultural winds be shifting yet again? Recently, there has been a wave of films foregrounding sex again – and depicting it as both transformative and fun. 

Indie provocateur Gregg Araki certainly has this point to make in his new film, I Want Your Sex. Araki is a veteran of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s – a gay-centred movement which produced films with raucous and progressive attitudes towards sex. Araki, with works like The Doom Generation (1995) under his belt, is no stranger to racy controversy. His oeuvre regularly explores the polyamorous, the sado-masochistic, and the generally non-vanilla. 

His latest film focuses on a young art world intern Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) who falls hard for his older employer Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). She’s a famous artist and a latex-clad, self-confessed "sexual astronaut" who revels in domination. Their inappropriate workplace affair spirals out of control, but Elliot doesn't seem to mind much for the majority of the movie. He's too busy loving being spanked, tied up and forced into submission. 

In the years while Araki was working on his screenplay, he noted the curious, near-puritanical attitudes about sex that had cropped up among even the most progressive young people. "They're afraid of making mistakes. But mistakes are how you learn," he recently told Empire Magazine. 

But as film critic and erotic thriller specialist Travis Woods says: "Movies are getting horny again. Perhaps not overtly, and certainly not to the level of the sweaty and vivid [erotic films] of the 1980s and 1990s. But film-makers are – however gently – beginning to explore sex and sexuality once again, on increasingly mainstream canvases. And why not? Sex is an essential component to the human experience."

He's right: I Want Your Sex is not the only recent film which puts being horny – and horny in bondage – front and centre. You may recall the buzz around Halina Reijn's 2024 workplace/BDSM romance Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman as a corporate hawk who wants nothing more than to get down on her knees for her dominant young employee (Harris Dickinson). British debut director Harry Lighton made waves recently with Pillion, a funny, explicit, and poignant romantic comedy about a shy young gay man (Harry Melling) who falls hard for an Adonis-like biker (Alexander Skarsgård) with extreme dominant tendencies.  If an old complaint about screen sex is that it can be........

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