‘One Night Only’ Director Cut Out “So Much Nudity” Because People Dislike Sex on Screen

When I shared my thoughts about Will Gluck’s “One Night Only,” starring Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner, I mentioned how, for a rom-com version of “The Purge,” where premarital sex is outlawed except for one night each year, the film feels oddly, and very particularly, not interested in sex.

Turns out, there’s a much more sexual version of the film, with lots of sex and nudity, that never made the cut.

Gluck tells Variety that initially “there was so much nudity in this movie,” including random shots of people having sex on street corners and in cars, but he felt it distracted viewers from the two main characters. Test audiences reacted negatively to it, and he “just kept editing it out until we got a balance.”

Gluck sees the reaction as part of a broader change in how audiences respond to sex and nudity on screen. He doesn’t think it’s simply a Gen Z or Gen Alpha thing, either.

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.

And apparently, even Gluck underestimated how far that shift had gone. “Once I’ve learned that, which was all through the editing process for my last movie, I applied it to this movie,” he says. “But even so, I didn’t apply it enough. I cut out so much.”

For a movie whose entire hook is essentially “what if everyone could have sex legally for one night?”, it’s a little funny that Gluck wound up cutting out much of the sex. Perhaps the most ironic thing is that the version of “One Night Only” that Gluck describes sounds, at least conceptually, closer to the movie I expected to see.

Isn’t there something particularly amusing about making a film where sex is supposed to be the one thing everyone is allowed to do, only to discover that nobody is actually doing it? This film’s premise is so inherently ridiculous that it almost feels like a missed opportunity not to have pushed it further into this more chaotic and excessive version Gluck seems to be describing.