By David Mack, CNN
(CNN) — Entertainment can often be a way for us to switch off. This year what’s on our screens has frequently been aimed at turning us on. From the sensual pleasures of “Wuthering Heights” to the steamy shower scenes in “Heated Rivalry”, sex has been front and center in a slew of recent hits in ways that might previously have made them ineligible to be mainstream cultural powerhouses. It’s safe to say horniness is having a moment.
Enter the next competitor for both your eyeballs and fantasies: “One Night Only,” a just-released romantic comedy that’s very much on the titillating trend. Starring Oscar-nominee Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner (aka Mr. Dua Lipa), the movie takes place in a universe where a conservative Congress has passed a law banning sex between single people — save for one night of the year in which they are permitted to go to town on each other in restaurants, on subways and in public parks. Sure, the premise is ridiculous — and one that’s sparked a slew of recent jokes online — but it ensures “One Night Only” is rife with lustful hunger that’s bound to appeal to horny audiences.
“It’s one of those premises that’s so bonkers and funny because you’ve got the easy logline of it being ‘The Purge’ but for sex,” said Sophia Benoit, a romance novelist and sex columnist who has been among those reveling in 2026’s entertainment offerings. “I often feel like I’m voting with my movie-going purchase: please make more things like this.”
Just like the characters in “One Night Only,” moviegoers like Benoit have been somewhat starved of seductiveness before this year’s onslaught. The level of sexual content across most movies fell by almost 40% between 2000 and 2023, according to a study of the 250 highest-grossing motion pictures each year by film-data analyst Stephen Follows that was published in the Economist. The website Kids-in-Mind.com, which rates theatrically released movies for parents, provided data to CNN showing that the number of films scoring at least an 8/10 on their sex and nudity scale dropped from 8% in 2016 to between 2-3% from 2019-2023, before climbing slightly to 4-6% in 2024-25, the last year of available data.
Five years ago, culture writer RS Benedict surveyed the cinematic landscape and decided things were so bleak that she penned a viral essay for the digital magazine “Blood Knife” entitled, “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny.” Comparing the biggest films of the 2010s with those of the 1980s and ‘90s, Benedict argued that while modern actors’ physiques had been perfected to near impossible levels of beauty, their characters were often do-gooder superheroes with the bodies of Adonises but the libidos of lemons. “No one is attracted to anyone else. No one is hungry for anyone else,” she bemoaned.
Things suddenly look very different. The jaw-dropping success of “Heated Rivalry” — and, to a lesser degree, “Off Campus” — has sent Hollywood scrambling to produce replicas, all while “Love Island USA,” a show in which attractive people compete by coupling up, has emerged as the most talked about reality TV program in the country. Even the boys on the once sickly sweet “Heartstopper” are getting down and dirty.
Eroticism also abounds on the silver screen — to such a degree that “The Odyssey” is being called out for its surprising chasteness. Bodices were ripped in “Wuthering Heights” and boots licked on the BDSM romance “Pillion.” Olivia Wilde’s film about swinging couples, “The Invite,” has been a critical success, while Wilde is also playing a dominant lover in the newly released “I Want Your Sex.” Audiences can also look forward to October’s “Verity,” an erotic thriller starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, and “Wicker,” a fantasy comedy in which Olivia Colman finds sexual satisfaction with a husband made of wicker, played by Alexander Skarsgård. A comedy about the making of the 1972 sex manual “The Joy Of Sex” has also just been greenlit.
“I think it’s pretty exciting to see sex coming back in,” Benedict said in an interview.
As Benedict had observed, the disappearance of sex from our screens came as the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a cultural juggernaut and mid-budget movies aimed at adults declined. For the sake of their bottom lines, studios drifted to movies based on trusted intellectual property with as much appeal as possible to different ages, demographics and foreign markets. “Hollywood started feeding this new generation characters that were sexless,” Richard Linklater, director of films like the “Before” trilogy and “Boyhood,” as well as 2023’s sexy “Hit Man,” complained to The Times. “Superheroes don’t have sex. They don’t have genitalia, frankly.”
The #MeToo movement in 2017 changed Hollywood’s approach to love scenes, providing greater protections to performers through intimacy coordinators. But Benoit, the sex columnist, believes the industry overcorrected in other ways, leaning too far into puritanism. She suspects Hollywood may have also been trying to cater to the tastes of Gen Z, whom surveys showed wanted to see less sex on screen—although there are differences of opinion there. “There was this closed fistedness of, ‘Well, we’re not going to give you anything then!’ Almost like a reactionary uptightness or revocation of sex and eroticism,” Benoit said. She noted that 2024’s “Twisters” even cut a kiss in the final scene between its leads, Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones, after executive producer Steven Spielberg advised against it, although the actors said this was done in order to keep the focus on Edgar-Jones’ character arc.
The sudden cultural upswing didn’t come from nowhere. Appetites for salacious content have been building for years, as evidenced by the booming number of romance bookstores across the country (just one in 2016 to more than 230 today). Groundwork has also been laid by steamy yet popular works like “Bridgerton,” “Saltburn,” “Challengers” and the Oscar-winning “Poor Things.” Erotic thrillers, a genre which peaked in the 1980s and ‘90s, have also been making a slow but steady comeback. While the British magazine Dazed declared in January 2025, almost a full year before “Heated Rivalry” debuted, that “everyone is horny now,” what feels different is the sheer number of works revolving around sex that have become mainstream fare.
“I do think this is different,” Benoit said about this cultural moment, which she believes has evolved beyond the gratuitous shots of breasts or rape featured on “Game of Thrones.” “There is much more romantic storytelling. It’s much queerer. There’s more of the ‘female gaze.’”
Much of the work being released today, Benoit noted, was first conceived in the immediate aftermath of the easing of the Covid pandemic, when social inhibitions were loosening and a sense of fun was returning. Esmé Louise James, a sex historian who authored the book “Kinky History,” also believes the ongoing impact of the pandemic is responsible for our increasingly adult tastes. “There was a huge change in our sexual exploration during this time,” James said, believing this also made having these conversations easier in mainstream media.
But James believes potentially bigger forces may be at work. Throughout history, she noted, there have been consistent demands for sexual content during times of political and social upheaval, such as how the French Revolution took place against the backdrop of pornography’s emergence as a commercial genre. This era of “major global disruption,” James said, is no different. “Sex in the media functions very much the same way today. It’s inherently political. It’s used to shock people, entice people, disrupt expectations and cause global conversation,” she said.
“One Night Only,” though more chaste than some other titles that have heated up the year, clearly hopes to emulate the success of director Will Gluck’s previous film, 2023’s “Anyone but You,” the romcom starring Powell and Sydney Sweeney that became a $220-million “global box office phenomenon.” Like that film, this new movie finds most of its sexiness in the chemistry and playful banter between its attractive stars. “One Night Only” is primarily about the act of yearning, which is something Benedict, the culture writer, suspects will be just as titillating to filmgoers. “The anticipation is just as much of a thrill,” Benedict said. “You’re building the tension. It makes the climax — pun slightly intended — that more satisfying.”
The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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