In times past . . .

In times past, there wasn't so much sex in films, and researchers found either no relationship1 , or a positive one2 , between the amount of sex (or the rating) and box office. When the range of a variable is less, the correlation may disappear or go in the other direction.

Take the sample of 917 films. Remove all the films that have moderate, heavy or extreme sex/nudity, and rerun the correlations. There are 199 films left with sex/nudity rated at mild or less.

Table 1: Data for 199 films with mild or less sex/nudity as rated by Screenit.com for the years 2001-2005.
  Box Office Rating Sex/Nudity Violence
Average $79,958,101 2.41 2.32 4.31
SD $90,289,102 0.88 0.74 1.36
N 199 199 199 199

Compare this to the original sample:

Table 2: Data for the original sample of 917 films rated on Screenit.com from 2001-2005
  Box Office Rating Sex/Nudity Violence
Average $44,864,951 3.29 4.52 4.46
SD $58,326,123 0.72 1.24 1.45
N 917 917 917 917

None of the means for the reduced sample are significantly different at p<0.05, but there is a trend, which shows up in the correlations.

When the range for sex is limited, the correlation between sex and box office is no longer significant. The correlation between MPAA and box office is also no longer significant.

Table 3: Correlations for the sample of 199 films with sex/nudity mild or less.
  rating sex/nudity violence % female
US gross -0.01
(-0.11)		 -0.02
(0.21)		 0.21**
(3.33)		 -0.02
(-0.26)
rating   0.25***
(4.13)		 0.60***
(13.50)		 -0.29***
(-3.56)
sex/nudity     0.10
(1.51)		 -0.03
(-0.47)
violence       -0.37***
(-4.40)
(**= significant at p<0.01; *** at p<0.001; T-values in parentheses)

Only violence is significantly correlated with box office, when sex/nudity is toned down. MPAA rating is mostly about violence at this point, although it still distinguishes films on the basis of sex.

So you see, whether sex sells or unsells or does nothing either way depends on how much of it there is. Arguments about the current situation need to be based on current data, not data from the early years of Playboy.

Anemone Cerridwen
November 28, 2007

1Litman, B.R. (1983). Predicting success of popular movies: An empirical study. Journal of Popular Culture 16:159-175 - found no correlation between MPAA rating and box office

2Philip Anast (1967). Differential movie appeals as correlates of attendance. Journalism Quarterly 44:86-90 - found that "eroticism" had a positive correlation with movie attendance