Director Will Gluck took the nudity out of his new romantic comedy One Night Only — and he says the decision came straight from research about what younger audiences will sit through in a cinema.

Gluck told Variety that recent studies showing Gen Z and Gen Alpha do not want to see sex on screen were a concern throughout production. He believes a societal shift has made people uncomfortable seeing nudity or adult situations in a shared theatre experience. The choice was practical, not aesthetic: give a cinema audience a film they will actually watch together (Variety).

One Night Only is a 2026 American romantic comedy set in New York City. Its premise: one night a year, premarital sex is legal. Divorce, meanwhile, is banned unless a couple has been married for one year plus one day, per municipal signage in the film. Monica Barbaro plays Allie, an aspiring singer; Callum Turner plays Owen, a pizza shop owner. Gluck directed, produced, and has script credit on the film (Variety).

Gluck is no stranger to the genre. He directed Easy A, the 2010 teen comedy starring Emma Stone, and Anyone But You (2023), the Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell vehicle that became a box-office sleeper hit. In an NBCUniversal interview published 6 August 2026, he discussed the theatrical promise of One Night Only with journalist Jacqueline Coley (NBCUniversal).

For the new film's marketing, Gluck coined the term "WOM-com" — built on the acronym WOM for word-of-mouth — signalling a bet that audiences will talk the film into theatres rather than respond to a conventional advertising blitz (Variety).

The broader question the film poses is whether romantic comedy, a genre built on the chemistry and tension between two leads, can still draw a theatrical crowd when its director has decided the genre's traditional adult content is now a liability rather than a draw. Gluck's answer is to strip it back: keep the premise, keep the pairing, lose what he thinks the room will no longer watch.