RoboCop, Showgirls and Basic Instinct director Paul Verhoeven has a very specific gripe with Marvel Studios and modern James Bond movies: the lack of sex.
"Sex is the essence of existence," Verhoeven told The Times. "Without it, there are no species anymore. So why is that a big secret? There is a new purity. Sexuality has been moved out of movies. In the 1970s you could talk about it. But you arrive now, decades later, and those movies are not possible anymore. It would be very difficult to make a film like Showgirls or Basic Instinct now."
"Sometimes [movies about crashing and blowing up] are fun, but the narrative tells you nothing about us now," he continued. "I don’t see any other thought in Marvel or Bond movies. There was always sex in Bond! They did not show a breast, or whatever. But they had some sex. I’d go back to reality. Cars that don’t leap up into the sky."
Verhoeven's remarks mirror those of Magic Mike director Steven Soderbergh, who in February issued a similar complaint. "For me to understand the world and how to write or supervise the writing of the story and the characters—apart from the fact that I can bend time and defy gravity and shoot beams out of my fingers—there’s no fucking," he said. "Nobody’s fucking! Like, I don’t know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing. I’m not a snob; it’s not that I feel it’s some lower tier in any way. It really becomes about what universe you occupy as a storyteller."
Ironically, Soderbergh revealed in 2020 that he nearly directed a James Bond movie but quit due to creative differences. "We were at odds about some things that were important," he explained. "We had some great conversations. It was fun to think about, but we just couldn't…the last ten yards were, we just couldn't do it, we couldn't figure it out."
One person who doesn't agree with Verhoeven or Soderbergh is Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. "With all due respect, Steven Soderbergh, some people are fucking," Gunn tweeted after Soderbergh's remarks, along with images from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Peacemaker and The Suicide Squad proving superheroes indeed have sex.
Source: The Times