BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN
CULTURE
CHANNING TATUM’S STRIPPER MAGIC MIKE pulls on bookcases and beams in the Miami home of a wealthy woman played by Salma Hayek Pinault. Hayek Pinault’s character looks confused, but if you’ve seen a Magic Mike movie, you know Mike is testing whether the furniture will hold up to his swinging and gyrating. Tatum has a particular talent for swiveling and thrusting in dances steamier than most sex scenes. In Magic Mike’s Last Dance, out Feb. 10, Tatum and Hayek Pinault’s characters do wind up in bed together, but whether they consummate the relationship is almost academic. He has already wrapped her legs around him and buried his face in her breasts before they ever undress, a rare moment of physical intimacy in a modern film with a big marketing push.
Movies aren’t sexy anymore—or at least the big-budget movies that studios dedicate resources to are devoid of lust. Comic-book films have come to dominate the box office, and in the words of Steven Soderbergh, the director of Last Dance, “nobody’sn f-cking” in those movies. It’s a sentiment he originally shared after being asked why he wasn’t interested in helming a superhero movie himself. “You can imagine the reaction to those comments,” he says now. But it’s true. The era of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman clawing the clothes off Michael Keaton’s Batman are gone. Instead we get Captain America, a character whose confounding virginity, given that he’s played by sex symbol Chris Evans, has been hotly debated for more than a decade.
Soderbergh specializes in adult dramas. His movies, like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Out of Sight, and Ocean’s Eleven, often exude sexiness, whether or not the characters act on their passions. “We liked the idea of making a sexy movie where there’s essentially no nudity,” he says of Last Dance.
But these days studios don’t put sexy thrillers or romances in theaters. They’re relegated to streaming. That was supposed to be the fate of Last Dance, which was financed by HBO Max. Soderbergh’s last three films were released exclusively on the platform despite featuring stars like Meryl Streep. “Kudos to Warner Bros.’ saying, when they saw the film for the first time, we have to go out theatrically,” he says. “That was thrilling because it was unexpected.”
Magic Mike has spawned two sequels, stage shows across the globe, and a reality TV series. That playing the latest installment in theaters would even be a question says quite a bit about the
