One Night Only director says test audiences made him purge "so much nudity" from his sex Purge movie

When Variety asked Gluck about this, they framed the question in terms of the focus that’s been put on Gen Z and Gen Alpha approaches to sex, but the director downplayed that generational aspect. Noting that he started running into this topic in a serious sense with his 2023 Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney romantic comedy Anyone But You, Gluck—who’s been working in this field since his 2010 Emma Stone vehicle Easy A—made it clear that he’s actually thought about modern cinematic sex attitudes quite a bit, as befits the man running around right now promoting his Sex Purge movie. “I have long pages of empirical data about it,” he asserted when asked about audience reactions to sex and nudity, adding that he thinks an overall “societal shift” about naked bodies in movies has taken place. “I believe it’s been a societal shift from taking nudity in adult situations and putting them on your phones at home for everybody. Now it’s more of a private, intimate thing that people don’t want to see when they’re in a shared experience. Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a big theater, they get uncomfortable.”

As a consequence, Gluck said that One Night Only—which features a large number of sexual conversations, obscured humping, and some pretty explicit stick figures, but very little in the way of actual nudity beyond a few bare butts—ended up undergoing pretty major cuts to the nudity he initially shot. Saying, of the lessons learned on Anyone But You, that “Once I’ve learned that, which was all through the editing process for my last movie, I applied it to this movie,” Gluck admitted, “Even so, I didn’t apply it enough. I cut out so much. There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets. I felt we needed to show the world that way.” But, Gluck says, “As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie. You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it. So we just kept editing it out until we got a balance, and those comments went away.” 

So, yeah: It kind of sounds like test audiences managed to purge all the actual sex from the sex Purge movie—the sort of stifling we can only imagine that world’s fictitious lawmakers would look on with nodding, un-horny approval.