Sex Doesn't Sell

King of Fools has noticed that R-rated pictures really aren't doing that well at the box office. Currently they are 62% of the movies made, yet they only earn something like 22% of the box office gross. So maybe sex doesn't sell.

Now to be fair to the movie makers, these statistics may be a bit misleading. There are a lot of crap horror and action movies out there. If you are going to make a bad movie, you make it R because at least then you can try to have graphic violence and sex take up the slack for the horrible suckage caused by everything else. So the signal to noise ration of R may be distorting the analysis a little. PG doesn't suffer from the cheaper slasher or T&A syndrome pumped out by lower tier production houses.

But still PG has a much broader potential audience. If you make a great PG movie like the Incredibles, everyone will watch it. If you make a great R movie like, ummm.... the Passion of the Christ (sorry took me a minute to think of one), there are a lot of adults that still won't go to see it because of the violence. Plus parents will not take their kids to it.

But really I think the big problem is that Hollywood has forgotten how to tell a good simple story. Everything needs to be more more more instead of crafting a smaller, tighter tale that people can relate to (and the studios can get a better return on investment with). Which is probably why independent cinema does so well. I generally find them pretentious, but occasionally there is a Napoleon Dynamite that changes my mind.