| The
Hollywood Economist
The numbers behind the industry.
In the New Hollywood, it's a liability and no nudes is good
news
In the early days of Hollywood, nudity—or the illusion
of it—was considered such an asset that director Cecil
B. DeMille famously made bathing scenes an obligatory ingredient
of his biblical epics. Nowadays, nudity is a decided liability
when it comes to the commercial success of the movie. In
2004, none of the six major studios' top 25 grossing films,
led by Spider-Man 2, Shrek 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner
of Azkaban, and The Incredibles, contained
any sexually oriented nudity; only one had a restrictive
R rating—Warner Bros.' Troy—and that
was mainly due to the film's gory violence, not its sexual
content. The absence of sex—at least graphic sex—is
key to the success of Hollywood's moneymaking movies. Directors
may consider a sex scene artistically integral to their
movie, but studios, which almost always have the right to
exercise the final cut, also have to consider three factors.
First,
there is the rating system. For a film to play in movie
theaters belonging to the National Association of Theater
Owners—which includes all the multiplexes in America—it
first needs to obtain a rating from a board organized by
the Motion Picture Association of America—the trade
association of the six major studios. All the expenses for
rating movies are paid to the MPAA by the studio out of
a percentage deducted from box-office receipts. As it presently
works, a movie that contains sexually oriented nudity gets
either an NC-17 or an R rating, depending on how graphically
sex is depicted. The NC-17 rating, which forbids theaters
from admitting children under the age of 18, is the equivalent
of a death sentence as far as the studios are concerned.
In fact, since the financial disaster of Paul Verhoeven's
NC-17 Showgirls in 1995, no studio has attempted a wide
release of a NC-17 film. As one Paramount executive suggested,
because of their sexually related nudity, movies such as
Louis Malle's Pretty Baby, Bernardo Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris, and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork
Orange would not even be considered by a major studio
today. So far this year there has been only one limited
release of an NC-17 film by a studio: the documentary Inside
Deep Throat, which yielded Universal less from the
box-office—$330,000—than it cost to wrangle
media stars and others to free screenings and dinners to
promote it.
If
a movie contains less explicit nudity, it earns an R rating,
which merely prohibits youth unaccompanied by an adult.
Even though this option means that some number of multiplex
employees—who might otherwise be selling popcorn—are
required to check the identity documents of the teenage
audience, theaters accept R-rated films, especially when,
as was the case with Troy, the R is for the sort
of graphic violence that is also the principal attraction.
But even if an R doesn't prevent studios from staging a
wide opening of a movie at the multiplexes, it complicates
the movie's all-important marketing drive. For one thing,
if a film receives an R rating, many television stations
and cable networks, particularly teenage-oriented ones,
are not allowed to accept TV ads for the movies. In addition,
an R rating—especially for sexual content—will
preclude any of the fast-food chains, beverage companies,
or toy manufacturers that act as the studios' merchandise
tie-in partners from backing the movie with tens of millions
of dollars in free advertising. As a result, it becomes
much more expensive to alert and herd audiences to R-rated
films.
Second,
there is the Wal-Mart consideration. In 2004, the six studios
took in $20.9 billion from home-video sales, according to
the studios' own internal numbers. (Click here to see data
in Table 1.) Wal-Mart, including
its Sam's Club stores, accounted for over one-quarter of
those sales, which means that Wal-Mart wrote more than $5
billion in checks to the studios in 2004. Such enormous
buying power comes dangerously close to constituting what
the Justice Department calls a monopsony—control of
a market by a single buyer—and it allows the giant
retailer to effectively dictate the terms of trade. Internet
mythology aside, Wal-Mart doesn't use its clout to advance
any political agenda or social engineering objective, according
to a studio executives involved in the process; it is "strictly
business." Wal-Mart uses DVDs, especially the weekly
released hits, to lure in customers who, while they pass
through the store, may buy more profitable items, such as
toys, clothing, or electronics.
Wal-Mart's main concern with the content of the DVDs is
that they not offend important customers—especially
mothers—by containing material that may be inappropriate
for children. It guards against this risk with a "decency
policy" that consigns DVDs containing sexually related
nudity to "adult sections" of the store, which
greatly reduces their sales. (Wal-Mart is less concerned
with vulgar behavior and language.) These guidelines, in
turn, put studios under tremendous pressure to sanitize
their films of sexual content. The Wal-Mart buyer would
merely have to order for their stores the "in-flight
entertainment" version of DVDs, from which studios
expunge nudity and other sexually explicit scenes for airline
passengers (censorship that almost all directors quietly
accept). In light of such leverage, studios have to weigh
the Wal-Mart factor with great care.
Finally,
movies with nudity are a problem for the studios' other
main moneymaker: television. As became abundantly clear
in the controversy surrounding Janet Jackson's wardrobe
malfunction at Superbowl XXXVIII, broadcast television is
a government-regulated enterprise. When the government grants
a free license to a station to broadcast over the public
airwaves, it does so under the condition that it conform
to the rules enforced by the Federal Communications Commission.
Among those rules is the standard of "public decency,"
which among other things specifically prohibits salacious
nudity—which is why CBS had to pay a fine for Ms.
Jackson's brief exposure. Because the FCC regulates broadcast
television (though not cable television), television stations
run similar risks—and embarrassments—if they
show movies that include even partially nudity. So, before
a studio can license such a movie to a broadcast network,
it first has to cut out all the nudity and other scenes
that run afoul of the decency standard. Aside from the expense
involved, it requires the hassle of obtaining the director's
permission, which is contractually required by the Directors
Guild of America. The same is true in studio sales to foreign
television companies, which have their own government censorship.
Since
graphic sex in movies is a triple liability, the studios
can be expected to increasingly find that the artistic gain
that comes from including it does not compensate for the
financial pain and greenlight fewer and fewer movies that
present this problem. We may live in an anything-goes age,
but if a studio wants to make money, it has to limit how
much of "anything"—at least anything sexually
explicit—it shows on the big screen. As one studio
executive with an MBA lamented, "We may have to leave
sex to the independents."
[back to archive]
|
