Yes, director Steven Sonderbergh did talk to Variety about the fact that superhero movies have gotten - aside from Marvel's Eternals - mostly sexless these days, but it's not what you think. We know, the image it conjures up is of some rando director sitting back in his chair and complaining that kids these days don't care about sex or something, but it's not like that. 

Variety asked the director, known for films like Traffic and Ocean's Eleven, if he's ever been approached about doing any superhero movies - since there are so many coming out these days - and Sonderbergh explained that, no, that's not really his avenue.

"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. I'm just too earthbound to really release myself to a universe in which Newtonian physics don't exist [laughs]. I just have a lack of imagination in that regard...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 f***ing,"

"Nobody's f***ing! Like, I don't know how to tell people how to behave in a world in which that is not a thing...the fantasy-spectacle universe, as far as I can tell, typically doesn't involve a lot of fucking, and also things like - who's paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?"

So Sonderbergh was never saying that he could never make a movie without a sex scene - what he's saying is that he, as a person, views the logistics of everyday life to integral to telling a story to leave any out - so when those aren't happening on screen, suddenly, he can no longer make sense of his characters. 

He's right, it's just a different mode of storytelling - though we wonder if he knows that Chloe Zhao opened up that door by introducing the first Marvel sex scene in Eternals.

(We kinda hope so - imagine an Avengers heist movie. Ocean's Eleven style. Now THAT we would watch - sex or no sex.)

Tags: Steven Sonderbergh Chloe Zhao