Many headlines were generated when it was revealed that Eternals would feature the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first-ever sex scene, but in the end the romantic entanglement between Richard Madden’s Ikaris and Gemma Chan’s Sersi turned out to be as chaste as the franchise itself, and hardly the groundbreaking moment of steamy superhero cinema many were expecting.
You could make an argument that the genre doesn’t need to feature any sort of comic book copulation at all, because otherwise we could end up having to relive the excruciating scene from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen set to the strains of “Hallelujah” all over again.
However, one person who wants to see costumed crimefighters bumping uglies way more often is Academy Award winner Steven Soderbergh, as he revealed in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“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. I just have a lack of imagination in that regard, which is why the one foray I had into pure science-fiction was essentially a character drama that happened to be set on a spaceship.
Also, for a lot of these, 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*cking. Nobody’s f*cking! 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 f*cking, and also things like — who’s paying these people? Who do they work for? How does this job come to be?”
Naturally, the filmmaker’s comments arose by way of him being asked for his thoughts and opinions on the contributions being made to the medium at large by the likes of Marvel and DC, which is apparently an obligation when any notable on or offscreen talent hits the press circuit these days.
He almost certainly isn’t going to get his wish from the MCU, but maybe The Batman will keep him satiated when it hits theaters in just a few weeks.