A couple of years ago, I looked into whether erotic thrillers were indeed dying out or if it was just availability bias due to the fact that the main examples which come to mind are mostly from the 1980s.
More recently, Rachel Lloyd from The Economist asked me to look more deeply at one of the charts, which indicated a decline in the levels of sexual content in movies.
This prompted me to update and deepen the dataset to help us examine what’s happening and speculate on why. You can read Rachel’s article in The Economist here, and I’ll share the data below.
We looked at the top 250 grossing films of each since 2000, tracking the level of sexual content via signals from film rating bodies and film databases. There’s more detail on the methodology and criteria at the end of the article.
