Dear Squawkers,
Last week, Variety published an article about the results from UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers, which polled around 1,500 people aged 10-24 about what sort of entertainment they prefer (video games continue to outpace movies). In that survey, 63.5% of adolescents preferred movies/TV to focus on friendships, and 62.4% said sex isn’t “needed as a plot device”; 51.5% of all surveyed said they want more stories about people in platonic relationships; and 47.5% said they don’t seek out movies/TV that have sex as a major plot point. (The 10-13 crowd was not asked about sex in their entertainment choices.)
This is depressing but consistent with what we already see in mainstream filmmaking, which is largely bland and sexless, and has been for the last two decades. As the bottom fell out of the physical media and home rental market in the 2000s, films had to start appealing to the widest audiences possible to maximize theatrical earnings, which meant more “go big or go home” filmmaking and less investment in mid to lower budgeted movies. The genre most deeply impacted by the shift to a predominately blockbuster filmmaking model was the adult-oriented drama which is where most of the sexy entertainment was contained. The people—mostly kids—polled in this survey have grown up in a world where, between algorithm-driven streaming and a dearth of adult-oriented fare, they are much less likely to be incidentally exposed to movies with more mature themes, including sex scenes. Thanks to algorithms, I genuinely wonder how many of them have been exposed to Harris Dickinson saying “good girl” in the Babygirl trailer.
It’s easy to “kids these days” this data and lament audiences that don’t seek challenging, adult fare for their entertainment, but I think the real problem is actually that kid and teen oriented entertainment has died, too.
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