Sex in Cinema: On the Demand for Female Nudity in Film

Abstract

 Sex sells in cinema—or does it? This paper measures the impact of the usual factors that influence box office success, with a focus on the potential contributions of female nudity. In addition to making contributions to the general literature on movie revenues, we contribute to the sparse literature on nudity and revenues—and find that female nudity is only related to box office success in two genres: horror (negatively) and drama (positively). We also introduce another metric for box office success which has a significant impact on the usual dependent variables in the literature.