Kidman and Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut

Las Vegas, March 21 (Reuters): You can laugh about it. Fantasise about it. Be punished or killed for it.

But what you can?t do is take sex seriously at the movies.

Look at the numbers on sexy movies. The list of box office casualties is long. Both versions of Lolita died at the box office, along with Striptease, Showgirls, Henry and June, Crash, The Brown Bunny, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Crimes of Passion, Wonderland and Original Sin. Boosted by raves, the 1998 porn-world flick Boogie Nights topped out at $26 million.

Even when Warner Bros. Pictures sold Eyes Wide Shut as a groundbreaking sex event movie starring Tom Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman, audiences blinked.

?People get itchy about straightforward sexuality,? Universal Pictures publicity executive Michael Moses says.

The old adage ?sex sells? no longer applies to the movies. ?Sex will not make something that is otherwise not entertaining sell,? producer Tom Pollock says.

?Movies work because they make you laugh, cry or (be) scared. Audiences won?t go to a movie because of sex.?

Most recently, even with a substantial boost from a studio marketing campaign, the NC-17-rated documentary Inside Deep Throat, which entertainingly tells the back story of the notorious 1972 porn film, failed to break out of the docu ghetto.One reason for audiences? lack of curiosity is that porn, from soft to hard, is readily available in every home, hotel and video store.

Compare the performance of Bernardo Bertolucci?s Last Tango in Paris, which scored $36 million in North America three decades ago, with his recent The Dreamers. Less well reviewed than Tango, Dreamers portrait of a youthful romantic triangle in 1960s Paris scraped up just $2.5 million.

But not even great reviews and a robust Oscar campaign helped Closer. Even with such names as director Mike Nichols and Julia Roberts, the sexy R-rated relationship movie grossed just $36 million.

Kinsey also grabbed great reviews and should have titillated audiences with its R-rated depiction of the notorious sex researcher and his team?s experiments with group sex, but it underperformed despite the best efforts of Fox Searchlight.

?There?s a lot of joking about sex,? says writer-director Bill Condon, ?but the actual idea of talking about sex makes a lot of people nervous, no question.?

As any theatre owner will tell you, American audiences like their movies PG and PG-13, not R, and certainly not NC-17. Last year, five of the top-10-grossing movies were PG. Of the top 25, only four were rated R. ?Increasingly, if a movie is rated R,? says producer John Goldwyn, ?audiences won?t go.?

?If you spell sex in marketing materials, it doesn?t sell,? producer Peter Guber says.

?If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. Laughter covers up insecurity. Sex sells, but not serious sex. Films can be sexy, but they can?t portray the sexual intimacy most people crave. The portrayal has to be violent or funny.?