Why Are Movies So Violent Today?

Increasingly, violence is viewed with justifiable horror in the real world. Onscreen, it's ramping up, for male and female actors. Why?

Hi everyone,

I was going to write an article about the future of deepfakes this week, but decided to address another pain point, why violence is so ubiquitous in movies today, and why female actors are increasingly cast in violent roles. These are big questions, and there are other media to consider, like video games. I don’t play video games and much ink has already been spilled fretting over violence in them, so I leave that to others. I watch movies. And… they’re violent. In action movies today, everyone—male and female—just kicks-ass. Beating up or killing people is all the rage. Why? Isn’t violence bad?

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Intro to Ass-Kicking Violence

Fact: violence is in fact increasing in movies today. Is it a fact? Yes. It is. Researchers publishing in the journal Pediatrics noted that gun violence in top grossing PG-13 films has “more than tripled since the introduction of the rating in 1985.” In a separate article, it’s pointed out that PG-13 movies now have more violence than R movies. Depressingly, too, researchers found that much onscreen violence can’t be explained by a “just deserts” theory, where good people deliver punishment to bad people. In other words, violence is everywhere in Hollywood, and it’s often meted out to innocents, or the not-obviously-wicked. The question is why? I’m not just talking about gun violence, an easy and well-explored target for gun control enthusiasts. I want to address not just the perennial bugbear we know as gun violence, but all violence, in movies. I focus here on what I like to call “ass-kicking violence,” a category that includes gun violence but also martial arts and any physical contact where one person in some confrontation engages another.

Someone engaging in ass-kicking violence might bludgeon someone with a rock, or use a fork or a knife or a cheese grater, as in the 2023 crime thriller, The Killer. Cool martial arts moves are a given, as are clever uses of the environment, like when the protagonist upends a table to temporarily ward off an attacker. It’s this violence that I see everywhere today, on Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Amazon Prime, you name it. Why is this kind of violence so prevalent today? And why is ass-kicking violence so popular today among female actors? There are no easy answers here, but we can explore the topic. Let’s get to it.

Theories of “Artistic” or Media Violence

As you might expect, philosophers have been theorizing about the popularity of violent content for human audiences for—literally—millenia. Culture and media researchers and critics now do the same. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Aristotle famously asserted that violence in Greek drama and tragedy was cathartic, enabling the audience to return to their peaceful existence, now satiated by Odysseus getting the Cyclops drunk on wine, then poking out his eye with a wooden stake, or Creon tearing off his own skin, or for that matter Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, watching his liver get eaten for eternity by an eagle, the emblem of Zeus. Cathartic theory makes a certain intuitive sense, but it’s wrong. More modern research makes clear that (at least angry) people watching violent content tend to get angrier, more ornery, and more violent. So much for catharsis.

The human progenitors in Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus

Add to Aristotle some no-brainer theories, like the adrenaline junky, who gets a dopamine rush (include here the sadist). There are white-knucklers, too, who don’t get off on the violence per se, but expose themselves to it to get to the lesson learned, or to learn better how to survive in the real world. Consider also benign masochists, and the half-creepy dark copers, who immerse in on screen violence in the belief that it helps them see life more truly.

What I found researching this topic is that really no one knows why people like movie violence, which is why multiple theories and viewpoints co-exist. The research has the feel of “how about this?” Well, how about it?

Equal Opportunity Ass-Kickers

Gender violence gets really hairy, really quickly. Take any violent act by a man against a woman, a scenario that in almost any context—including cinema—is treated like domestic violence and ugly patriarchal aggression. A woman like real-life MMA fighter turned Hollywood actress Gina Carano really could beat up a lot of guys (and does, onscreen, in say Haywire—just ask Michael Fassbender.) Carano can get in a serious fist-a-cuffs with a man onscreen and might even be cast as losing (the old adage: there’s always someone tougher)—though to my knowledge this has never happened in her movies. But she’s the exception that proves the rule. People expect men to be better in physical combat than women, so if the director deliberately crafts scenes to highlight this it seems silly, ham-handed, and in bad taste (and it is).

Real life fighter Gina Carano

The hit series The Terminal List stars a beefy Chris Pratt basically beating up or killing everyone. It’s believable, actually, as the bad ass is a burly steel-faced dude and not, say, Ana De Armas playing ass-kicking Paloma in No Time To Die. But viewers picked up on this, and the series caught a good deal of social media grief from critics denouncing it as male-dominated revenge porn. What do you expect from an embittered Navy Seal? Poetry?

Chris Pratt plays a revenge driven Navy Seal in the 2022 thriller The Terminal List