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One point I haven't seen here is that there imo has been a general move towards always pandering to all groups, all at once in our media, and movies are no exception. There's more indie games, sure, but all media that costs a lot of money to produce and is expected to earn lots of money is generally designed to appeal much more to an average perso than to a small niche. As a very different example, look at the casualization of most traditionally nerdy gaming franchises such as Civ.
You might wonder what this has to do with nudity. Simple, women by and large do not like explicit nudity very much, as you can see even when they consume schlocky stupid porn, they read it, they don't watch it, and sex only happens sparingly. So what happens when you want to make an action movie, but also want to get the guys girlfriend to watch it alongside him to earn double the money? The MCU. You make the guys hot but never nude, they're manly but never rude (except to people who clearly deserve it). You include just enough of love stories for the women to not get bored. You include some female heroes, but they're even more idealized than the already-unrealistic male action heroes. All of this is (and more, such as your already-mentioned example of pandering to non-western audiences) imo just the logical endpoint of a slow march of optimization towards earning maximum money with your media.
Alternative hypothesis for casualisation of video games: the target market for Civ games used to be young men with lots of free time but no money. Now a big part of the market is employed men in their 20s/30s who have lots of money but don’t want to spend tens of hours figuring out the mechanics.
It’s not that the target audience is no longer nerds, it’s that the nerds got older.
That's certainly a possibility, but it just does not at all fit with my experience both with IRL nerdy friends and online communities. The old guard just is consistently unhappy with the directions these franchises are taking, but just gets utterly swamped by newcomers who think the old games are weird and customer-unfriendly (admittedly not 100% wrong, a lot of older games had awkward UIs and missed QoL features that are normal nowadays). And while the old guard is almost exclusively socially awkward white and asian nerdy men, the newcomers are genuinely much more mixed along all axis of identity (which isn't surprising given that the whole point of the new direction is making the game more accessible to a larger group of people). And even the newcomers who agree with the old guard turn out to be ... socially awkward nerdy men.
Fair enough. I'm resting on my own experience as a nerdy man who used to have a limited number of games and play them to death, but now buys a lot more games and only plays them if they grab me. This is matching anecdote against anecdote, of course, I should really try and get some actual data. And it's quite possible that both causes of casualisation are at play.
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This is what they call 'four quadrant" films, films that penetrate all major demographics. Marvel has it pretty spot on with no sex and minimal romance, and you can't argue with money.
Yeah basically this, nudity is just a tiny element of this larger development.
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