Profanity In Movies

Is there more sex, violence, and profanity in today 's movies?

It seems today

That all you see

Is violence in movies

And sex on T.V.

Theme Song from Family Guy

Every deep conversation about the current state of cinema will inevitably lead to the consensus that movies nowadays feel more, well, inappropriate. Explosions and shootouts left and right, loads of sex scenes, f-bombs every other sentence. It just seems the good old times of cinema are gone.

Our job here at wonderif is to be curious, and we started wondering: is there really more sex, violence, and profanity in today 's movies?

Before we start, a little notice about the charts

All data is about the Top 100 in the box office per year, as reported by BoxOffice Pro

Charts are smoothed,

Profanity from The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Using this data, we can get a very accurate sense of actually how much profanity happens per year.

First, let 's say that before 2000, most movies only have counts for F-Words (other categories have unquantifiable terms like "a few" or "several").

For the last few years, F-Words are being used in levels only seen in 1999. With its peak in 2013 (Wolf of Wall Street), it is the most common profanity in movies. Scatological terms are on the rise, with sexual ones going on the opposite direction.

So... Is there really more sex, violence, and profanity in today 's movies?

All data shows a steady increase on the amount of movies with violence, with themes like death and blood being a constant nowadays. Sex has been showing a similar upward trend, maintaining high levels since the end of the 90s. Profanity is having a revival from its peak in the end of the 90s, with the last few years having the biggest amount of F-words ever seen.

Overall, the movie industry has been partying like it 's 99, and we don 't see that changing anytime