'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 "boring", this new wave of films do everything to ensure the opposite, depicting sex as silly, fun, and sometimes ridiculous.

If the obvious link between many of these films is that they deal with BDSM and kink, it's not their only common ground. Each was made by queer and/or women film-makers, and each offers a rompy but complex view of sexual experience. They incorporate a winking defiance of conservative mores around monogamy and promiscuity, and most of all, an understanding of both the highs and lows of exploratory sex.

Another new release exploring similar themes is The Invite, Olivia Wilde's second film as a director. A chamber piece on polyamory, narrow minds, and marital dissolution, it stars Wilde as a neurotic wife hosting a dinner party for her neighbours alongside her sarcastic, disinterested husband (Seth Rogen). The neighbours, played by Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton, turn out to be a freewheeling, open-minded polyamorous couple, and they offer the unhappy couple a chance to sexually experiment. Of course, all hell breaks loose. While the film does not feature sex scenes as such, its frank discussion of marital sex – or lack thereof – is bracing. 

As Woods points out, we're not exactly at the point of another cinematic sexual revolution just yet. But these new films are, he says, "reminding us of how hot cinema can be. And how playfully, thoughtfully, and enjoyably it can engage with what turns us on. It's a very intriguing cinematic foreplay to something just around the corner." It should be noted too that TV, as well, has been leaning into frank, unabashed explorations of sexual desire and kink of late, with shows like DTF St Louis, Dying for Sex and Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed.

Often, Hollywood films of the last few decades might have treated sex as an afterthought, avoiding detail and throwing in a few visual stereotypes of hands in the bedsheets and moving on. It can be understandable if the motivation is to make the shoot more comfortable and safer for all involved, but the result can sometimes mean a generic, let's-get-it-over-with sex scene that adds little to the characterisation or narrative. The rise of the on-set intimacy co-ordinator may have gone some way in changing this. Given their specific work is to both protect actors on set and to choreograph these scenes in detail, the idea of rushing through a sex scene may be a thing of the past. 

The prevalence of BDSM in many of these new films is also significant, beyond the bold aesthetic appeal of whips and latex. If all sexual relationships have power dynamics, BDSM makes them literal. Though film-makers like Araki, Lighton, Sriram and Reijn depict how labels like submissive and dominant may be misleading – how power can be wielded even on the "sub" side of the equation. Through kink, the very fact of acknowledging power dynamics can become empowering for both parties. Whether these sexy power struggles stay in the bedroom or creep outside of it, they matter to our lives in more complicated ways than we like to admit.

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As with Kidman's powerful feminist CEO in Babygirl, the role a person inhabits daily can be the opposite of what they want in bed. She is so completely in control of her career that she yearns for someone else to take over during sex. In I Want Your Sex, Elliot – unsure of what he wants from his life as a recent art-school grad – says he loves being submissive because "he doesn't have to make any decisions". Lust can reveal things to us about ourselves and our needs. 

"For these protagonists, digging into their sexual fantasies brings them closer to self-actualisation," says Jourdain Searles, a film critic for The Hollywood Reporter with a specialism in female screen sexuality. "Recent films like Pillion and I Want Your Sex approach sex from both an emotional and psychological place." 

Of course, to be horny and act on it is not without downsides. In Babygirl, Kidman's affair risks capsizing her career and marriage. In I Want Your Sex, Erika humiliates Elliot and nearly implicates him in a felony. He complains that Erika has ruined his life, but the pair still have affection for one another. This sexual misadventure has not ruined anyone's life, but it has made a short-term mess. The understanding of this nuance is what makes Araki's film so smart: pain and pleasure, or eroticism and discomfort, often come hand-in-hand. 

A similar idea plays out in Lighton's lower-key, realistic Pillion: in spite of the most direct stated boundaries and parameters, sex has a tendency to surprise. It can be awkward, funny, erotic, aggressive: sometimes in a matter of moments. And it becomes easy to confuse with love. Erika tells a rapturous Elliot that she loves him in I Want Your Sex. Then she laughs and says she's teasing him. In Pillion, the promise of real romance blooms, but Skarsgård's stoic, avoidant biker was always going to break hearts. It's a tenderly-sketched theme: sex is essential, but it may teach you lessons the hard way. 

Wilde, involved in two of these sexy new releases, has some thoughts on the matter. In a recent interview, she was asked to give advice to young people who are embarrassed by sex. She said: "Every embarrassing thing that will ever happen to you is a badge of honour. If you live a life without embarrassing moments, you've lived a boring life."

In these recent films, this advice bears itself out. In all their outrageous glory, they remind us that joy – and embarrassment – is part of the deal when it comes to sex. What could be more necessary than that? 

I Want Your Sex is out now in US cinemas and released on 28 August in UK cinemas. The Invite is out now in both US and UK cinemas.

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