If adult films (films with sex and/or nudity) were shown in mainstream movie theaters, how well would they stack up against visual effects-laden films (films like Jurassic Park and Avatar) at the box office?
The premise requires a change in circumstance from our current world, and the answer depends on the precise nature of that change in circumstance. The only way porn would be shown in mainstream movie theaters would be if the public attitude towards porn were substantially different.
Let’s say that we jump past the first couple and their impact for sheer novelty value and get to a point where they are common.
People go to big effects movie multiple times: that’s the only reason they make so much money. People watch porn to masturbate: that’s the only reason they make so much money. People will not go to theaters multiple times to masturbate. QED
The real question is how well big budget porn would do in the DVD and streaming video markets. My WAG is that it would do well, but not as well as you might think. The porn business survived by cutting its product to fit into millions of tiny niches. People still pay for porn because some sites provide a reliably good product to suit those tastes. Sex in and of itself is still probably the largest single category but a minority of the overall market. There’s no reason to think big budget porn would work any differently.
How much competition would they be? Pretty much zero.
If they released a porn across the country at major theaters it would do such poor business they’d never do it again.
Back in the days before internet, dvd, vhs, etc. the only source of porn films was those crappy little theaters in the bad part of town shown late at night. Even a bunch of horny high school boys wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like. They were reserved for a pretty sleazy crowd.
VHS made porn films available to the masses.
You can make porn cheap and therefore the market will always be flooded with product and sold cheap. Special effects cost money which will keep the product scarce and therefore keep its value high in comparison to porn.
My gf would NOT go with me to a porn movie.
Didn’t they show some honest-to-God pornos in regular theaters in the early 70s? Like “Deep Throat”?
How did it do vs. the other movies at the time? Seems like that would be the high point for that kind of thing; not too much later, cable TV and VCRs changed the landscape for porn.
According to IMDB, Deep throat grossed $45,000,000 in the US in 1972. That’s not too shabby…
And I agree. Some people enjoy watching porn without touching themselves. Some may go to a theater, watch without doing the above, and be fine. Most people would prefer to be at home, usually alone, with the blinds closed.
Deep Throat was shown almost exclusively in porn-oriented theaters, AFAIK. Even in New York, it played in the kind of Times Square theater that gave Times Square its reputation. It was outright banned in many locations.
This number is the sum total of all business the movie is thought to have done over the entire period since its release. Nobody knows the real number. At least $45 million is far more realistic than the $600 million Joe Bob Briggs credited it with.
Cute. I did say “multiple times,” though. 
Are you old enough to remember that porn moviegoers used to be called “the raincoat crowd”? Hint. It wasn’t because they only went in bad weather.
2005’s “Pirates” had a $1 million budget, the sequel, “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” had a reported $8 million budget.
Not quite “Avatar,” but that’s pretty huge for porn, and the second one in particular had a ton of CGI. Both had reasonable plotlines, both also had edited-down-to-R versions for distribution as well.
I have not yet been able to find actual revenue numbers, just ancecdotal stuff like still being in top-10 sales lists a couple years after release. (searching for terms like “Pirates porn” really gives a lot of results I’m not looking for…)
I’ve seen them, it probably helps that they are decent films even on their own non-porn merits, plus I imagine some of their sales are helped simply by the notoriety of how high-budget they were.
Let’s not even consider billion-seller Jurassic Park/Avatar-class phenoms as mentioned in the OP. For every hit in the *Batman Begins/Ocean’s Twelve/Happy Feet-*class, there are scores of other action, scifi, mystery, animation, romcom etc. productions the same year, that don’t stand a chance in the marketplace (*and *every so often a high-production-concept movie bombs). Meanwhile the “sleepers” that become a hit without being highly production-laden films, or vehicles for a superstar or tied in with a prior bestseller book or flick, are those with superior writing or acting and in this century they don’t make the box-office top 10. To make it even into the top 30 a porn flick would have to be as highly produced AND/OR well written or fan-anticipated as the others that make that cut – and audiences have grown more demanding, plus even more importantly, the audience of today has seen it all already pornwise. In 1972-73 that first generation of “Porn Chic” was cashing in on the cresting of the sexual revolution wave and the fall of the bans and censorship laws. What are you going to bring the audience of today that is new to them?
Check out the worldwide gross box office for 1972 US-made films. *Deep Throat *and Behind the Green Door were well up in the Top 10. The next year Devil in Miss Jones makes much less, $15M, and is just outside the Top 10. And then that’s it for porn getting anywhere close to the Top 10 (Porn as such, as opposed to X-rated “art” film a-la Last Tango In Paris which itself relied on a huge star’s draw). Novelty wore off, they started being made fast and cheap, and anyway you could now see naked gals in R-rated flicks that were also being made fast and cheap, without having to mingle with the raincoaters.
Here are box office numbers for 2012. Some are a bit of a headscratcher to be sure. So once you get porn that’s as well written and produced and acted as any of the top 20, then maybe once again the first one or two years the novelty factor may put you up there but then what? By year three you’re going to need to have in your porn flick a veritable “Meryl Streep of blowjobs” to bring in the crowds or you’re falling below the top 50.
Yes, let’s check them out. The footnote in that link goes to the-numbers.com, which says this:
Seriously. That’s an exact cut-and-paste, not a garbled transcription made by a drunk typist.
The one for Behind the Green Door is even worse, really nothing more than a mere link to IMDb. Which has no backup for its numbers.
Not a particle of evidence is given that those numbers are real for the year 1972. Or ever.
Did those movies make a lot of money? Sure. As much as Jeremiah Johnson and Deliverance, despite only being in a tiny fraction as many theaters? We can’t ever know for sure. But I’ll doubt it until some real evidence appears.*
*I was going to say “until hard evidence comes” but you’re not going to catch me saying that in this thread. 
Wikipedia, which claims Deep Throat made $45,000,000 in its initial year of release, also claims it made $3,000,000 in its first six months of release - and that’s with a June release date. Obviously these figures are not compatible.
My guess is the Numbers figure was supposed to be $4,500,000 but it got mistyped as $45,000,000 and then copied in Wikipedia.
Deep Throat hit the mainstream enough that it was reviewed by
Roger Ebert in his mainstream paper.
And that review gives a bit of the mood surrounding it generally at the time as well.
I believe that a lot of multiplexes have made “voluntary” pledges to not show NC-17 and X movies so as to ease permitting and zoning processes (I don’t think municipalities can formally require this) so it would require, as was said above, such a cultural change to how porn is viewed that it is impossible to predict. But if AMC’s right now started showing PrimeTime Porn Screenings, I doubt they’d be well attended.
They’re making a Fifty Shades of Grey movie, aren’t they? Unless they’re going to focus on the money porn angle and not the alleged eroticism of the novels, wouldn’t that count as a mainstream porn title?
If they don’t show penetration, no. And they won’t.
“Sir, don’t forget your fapcup!”
I was curious about this when I recently saw Slapshot for the first time (made in the mid-70s). At the parade at the end, through a generic mining/mill (I forget which), they show the marquis of the main-street theatre in the background. I forget whether you see all of the title “Deep Throat” or just enough of it to infer what it is. Made me wonder whether a small-town theatre in the 70s would really be showing it, or if it was a sly, satirical detail inserted into the movie. Hell, maybe it really was showing there at the time when they filmed the scene.
Was this particular marquis named de Sade, by any chance…?