Here's the thing. Will Gluck made a romantic comedy about the one night a year when premarital sex is legal, shot actual nudity on the streets of New York, and then spent the editing process systematically removing it because test audiences kept physically recoiling.
'Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a big theater, they get uncomfortable,' Gluck told Variety. 'You're engaged in the characters and what's going on, and then you pan over and there's two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience… it's a physical thing.' His conclusion, backed by what he calls 'long pages of empirical data' from two productions: the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives.
The movie — think The Purge, but the contraband is sex — stars Monica Barbaro as an aspiring singer moonlighting in pharmaceutical jingle commercials and Callum Turner as a pizza shop owner whose girlfriend decides she wants to exercise her annual legal option with someone else. They keep running into each other across 12 hours of New York chaos. The premise is enforced by subcutaneous tracking chips and color-changing tattoos: red for single, green for married, and briefly green for everyone on 'The One Night.'
The Verge reviewed the film and noted it is 'somewhat desexed, even though sex is the explicit topic' — which, given the editing history, tracks. The chip enforcement mechanism is, in the publication's words, basically 'science???' Dopamine and erotic neurochemicals are monitored; two people spiking in proximity constitutes a violation. Verge staff immediately generated the obvious edge cases: simultaneous puppy sightings, shared drug use, roommate proximity. The film does not resolve these.
On the world-building side, Gluck says Congress passed the mandate at the urging of a Christian-coded tech megacorp that manufactures the chips — the company's CEO is described by The Verge as 'distinctly more JD Vance-like than Elon Musk-esque.' Teen pregnancy is down. Divorce requires one year and one day of marriage. Municipal signage explains the amendments. Products in the background — Duolingo, Red Bull, Dunkin, Equinox, Durex — are not paid placements; Gluck says he had to beg brands to participate and most said no.
Gluck's last rom-com, 2023's Anyone But You with Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, was a box office sleeper hit driven by word-of-mouth. He's calling the strategy a 'WOM-com.' The cast, he notes, spends 80 percent of every talk show appearance explaining the rules of the world rather than selling the movie.
The demo is not the product, as they say — and in this case, neither is the nudity. What Gluck has actually shipped is a film that uses a surveillance-state sex mandate as wallpaper for a conventional love story, stripped down (pun intended) by audience feedback until the R-rated premise and the PG-13 comfort level of a shared theater experience reached an uneasy equilibrium. Whether that balance holds at the box office is the only benchmark that matters now.
