They say that ‘sex sells’, but if that’s true, why has it practically disappeared from modern Hollywood filmmaking? It wasn’t always this way: romantic scene...
tl;dr: capeshit/MCU/nerds/streaming killed sex in movie theaters.
I don't miss sex scenes, but I do miss romantic subplots. I think the latest generation of Hollywood reexamining all of the bad "romantic" tropes in movies fell short because while they did finally learn that damsels in distress and trophy characters were bad, they failed to come up with something to replace them with, and now every male-female dynamic in pop films is either a preestablished relationship or something seemingly completely platonic (and in some cases it's both, like in Iron Man where he has no sexual tension with his assistant outside of a couple snarky asides but then they apparently get married and have a daughter in between films).
I don't miss sex scenes, but I do miss romantic subplots. I think the latest generation of Hollywood reexamining all of the bad "romantic" tropes in movies fell short because while they did finally learn that damsels in distress and trophy characters were bad, they failed to come up with something to replace them with, and now every male-female dynamic in pop films is either a preestablished relationship or something seemingly completely platonic (and in some cases it's both, like in Iron Man where he has no sexual tension with his assistant outside of a couple snarky asides but then they apparently get married and have a daughter in between films).