Current Events > Studios are caring less and less about China. Embracing sex and eroticism.

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Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in Challengers, a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. Its getting hot in here, the hip-hop soundtrack intones, as she closes her eyes and runs her hands through her hair, lost in fantasy. So take off all your clothes.

The story continues at a motel, where Zendaya, playing a tennis prodigy, begins a mnage trois with two guys; it fizzles after they become more interested in each other. The plot moves on to sultry interplay on the hood of a car, in a dorm room, in the back seat of a car, on the wooden slats of a sauna. There is erotic churro eating.

Sex is back! shouted an elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease Challengers screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month.

Trend spotting in cinema is a hazardous pursuit. Think about how many times the rom-com has been declared dead and alive and dead. (No, wait, alive.) But this much can be said with surety: Hollywood is hornier than it has been in years.

It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects, said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and producing force behind Challengers.

I welcome that, she added.

Eroticism used to be common in studio movies like Challengers, which was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Body Heat, Basic Instinct, An Officer and a Gentleman, Fatal Attraction, Disclosure, Cruel Intentions and Eyes Wide Shut are among the many examples from the 1980s and 90s.

In the 2000s, however, film companies started to obsessively focus on PG-13 franchises and animation genres that could play to a global audience and sell merchandise. Studios also wanted to expand into China, where censors do not allow sex scenes. As a result, steamy storytelling began to dwindle on the big screen (except at art house theaters). Premium television picked up the slack.

Sex in mainstream movies was pretty much gone by 2019, as Ann Hornaday, chief film critic for The Washington Post, wrote in a column that year. A few months later, Kate Hagen, writing in Playboy magazine, found that only about 1.2 percent of films released between 2010 and 2020 contained an overt sex scene, the lowest decade total since the 1960s. (It peaked in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, that was the decade when pornography started to become available online.)

Now, some filmmakers are pushing back.

Awards season brought Saltburn, with its arousing-disturbing bathtub scene and Barry Keoghans twirling, full-frontal finale. Poor Things found an insatiable Emma Stone romping through a Paris brothel. Christopher Nolan filmed the first sex scenes of his 35-year career for Oppenheimer. (More interested in the joys of sex than any recent season I can remember, as Kyle Buchanan, awards columnist for The New York Times, described the crop of contenders in February.)

Perhaps contributing a degree of sexual liberation: Studios have stopped chasing China, where ticket buyers have turned against Hollywood movies en masse.