Universal Pictures
One Night Only director Will Gluck says he cut extensive nudity scenes because of Gen Z audiences
One Night Only is a romantic comedy built around a directly sexual premise, as it takes place in a world where adults can only have premarital sex on one night of the year — a rom-com version of The Purge, if you will. The movie, however, does not feature any sex scenes.
In a new interview with Variety, One Night Only director Will Gluck explained that he had filmed extensive nudity and background sex scenes to world-build the film’s central conceit but removed them after test screenings showed that Gen Z audiences became visibly uncomfortable and distracted whenever explicit content appeared on screen.
One Night Only stars Monica Barbaro, who earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Joan Baez in the Bob Dyaln biopic A Complete Unknown.
One Night Only director Will Gluck says he cut extensive nudity scenes because Gen Z test audiences were visibly distracted by them
“The answer is 100% yes. I went through this on two movies. I have long pages of empirical data about it,” Gluck said when asked about recent studies that suggest that Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t want to see sex on screen.
“The only thing is I don’t think it’s just Gen Z and Gen Alpha. 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. Whenever people now see nudity or very adult situations in a big theater, they get uncomfortable,” he continued.
“Once I’ve learned that, which was all through the editing process for my last movie, I applied it to this movie. But even so, I didn’t apply it enough. I cut out so much. There was so much nudity in this movie that we shot on the streets. I felt we needed to show the world that way. As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie.”
Gluck’s decision was naturally unpopular on social media, with various reactions to the move going viral.
Im gen z and I would love to see Monica Barbaro naked https://t.co/3ZoTxJQPx7 pic.twitter.com/eMgC9yW7M4
— Baz (@Walkman131) August 8, 2026
Yeah what sick freak would want to see sex in a sex comedy about sex? https://t.co/9YAhqvo1Mf
— Adriano InfinityVision Caporusso 🔜 TIFF (@AdriCaporusso) August 7, 2026
“This sort of prudishness is a slippery slope towards a world where there’s only one night a year when it’s legal for single people to have sex,” one viral tweet joked.
“This guy cut nudity out of the Monica Barbaro movie? are you out of your f—— mind?” a second popular tweet bemoaned.
“A Bug’s Life director cut out ‘so many bugs’ because people dislike bugs on screen: ‘They’re gross’,” a third cracked.
Gluck’s decision, however anecdotally unpopular, reflects that younger audiences, particularly Gen Z, are simply less comfortable with explicit intimacy in communal theatrical viewing settings than prior generations.
In addition to Barbaro as an aspiring singer, One Night Only, which is now playing in theaters, stars Callum Turner as a pizza shop owner navigating New York City on the one night a year that people can have premarital sex.