Here are the top 12 NC-17 movies of all time, ranked by domestic box office.
NC-17 movies came into effect to address the fact that many films with strictly adult content also have artistic merit.
But the rating still carries a stigma in some circles, which is reflected in the fact that no NC-17 movie has ever cracked a mere $37 million at the U.S. box office.
But First, Some Background on NC-17 Movies
The first movie to receive an “X” was Brian DePalma’s 1968 film Greetings, which starred a very young Robert De Niro and was deemed too explicit for the R rating. A year later, United Artists released Midnight Cowboy with an X to avoid fighting with the Motion Picture Association. It went on to win the Oscar for best picture. (It could be argued that it gained added attention in part because it bore the new, sensational scarlet letter X.)
For a while, it seemed like a film could carry an X and still earn respectability. But soon, the rating came to be dominated by straight-up adult fare, which hurt the rating’s reputation and could ruin a movie’s chances of ever being seen by a wide audience.
At the end of the ’80s and dawn of the ’90s — a fertile period for boundary-pushing films like Henry: Portait of a Serial Killer and The Cook, The Thief, The Wife and Her Lover — the Motion Picture Association decided that a new rating was needed that wouldn’t carry the stigma of the X rating.
And so the NC-17 movie was born. It sent a message that a film was worthy of mainstream release — but that children under 17 should absolutely not be admitted to see it. Unlike R rated movies, which welcomed children as long as they were accompanied by an adult, NC-17 movies were strictly for grown-ups.
But the rating didn’t exactly free up films that carried it for big box-office success, as you’ll see in this list of the top-grossing NC-17 movies of all time.
The Dreamers (2003)
A story of an American university student (Michael Pitt) in Paris who meets an odd brother and sister and becomes involved in a love triangle. It makes many references to French New Wave cinema, and gets fairly explicit, but is best known as the breakout film for Eva Green, who made her debut in The Dreamers.
She later told The Guardian that when she saw the film in a rough cut, “I was quite shocked. … For me it was as though I was wearing a costume while we were making the film. It was as if I had another story in my mind. So I was left speechless.”
Fox Searchlight Pictures released the film uncut domestically with an NC-17 rating, and it played at 116 theaters — a very limited release. It earned $2.5 million and $24 million worldwide.
Interestingly, the director of this film, Bernardo Bertolucci, also directed the No. 1 film on this list of the top NC-17 movies.
Crash (1996)
David Cronenberg is well known for pushing boundaries, and did he ever with the cult classic Crash, which is not to be confused with the Best Picture winner of the same name.
Led by James Spader, who had quite a run with edgy movies, starting with Sex, Lies, and Videotape, this film based on a 1973 J.G. Ballard novel is about a film producer who, after surviving a car crash, falls in with a group of symphorophiliacs — people who are turned on by disasters. In this case, the disasters are, of course, car crashes.
The film received a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and understandably grossed out some people with its blunt treatment of the subject matter. It earned $2.6 million total.
All of these numbers, by the way, come courtesy of BoxOfficeMojo.
Happiness (1998)
A very tough watch, this film by Todd Solondz was the follow-up to his comparatively tame Welcome to the Dollhouse — a movie no one would call “tame.”
The most troubling storylines concerns a fairly unrepentant child predator, played by Dylan Baker, and the effect of his sickening behavior on his son.
The film earned just under $3 million, total.
Shame (2011)
A brilliant film whose director, Steve McQueen, would go on to win Best Picture for his 2013 film 12 Years a Slave.
Shame follows a sex addict, played by frequent McQueen collaborator Michael Fassbender. Carey Mulligan plays his sister, from whom he tried to hide his addicition. The tone is relentless and unnerving.
Shame earned $19 million. It’s also the most recent film on this list, which should tell you something about how far filmmakers will go these days to avoid releasing NC-17 movies.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)
A perfect example of the kind of movie that spawned the NC-17 rating, and the first of two Pedro Almoldóvar films on this list.
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is the story of Ricky (Antonio Banderas), a 23-year-old former mental patient who kidnaps an adult actress, Marina (Victoria Abril, pictured). Things get weirder.
The Spanish film earned just over $4 million.
Lust, Caution (2007)
An erotic spy thriller directed by Ang Lee and based on the 1979 novella by Eileen Chang, this co-prodduction from China, the U.S., Hong Kong and Taiwan is the top-grossing NC-17 movie worldwide, pulling in $67,091,915 globally.
Only $4.6 million of that was from the U.S., which is why the film isn’t higher on this list, which is, again, based on domestic box office.
Besides having one of the best titles of any movie ever, Lust, Caution is known for a stellar cast that includes Tony Leung and Tang Wei.
ShoWest gave Ang Lee a Freedom of Expression Award for his decision to release the film uncut in the United States, refusing to make cuts that would have gotten him an R rating.
Bad Education (2004)
The second Pedro Almoldóvar film on this list — and not to be confused with multiple other projects called Bad Education — this Spanish neo-noir stars Gael García Bernal as Juan, Ángel Andrade and Zahara in a twisty story of identity and crime.
The film was given an NC-17 for a “scene of explicit sexual content” involving an act seen at the start of the film. Though the film was released with the scene in theaters, it was blurred in home video release, resulting in an R rating.
Globally, this is the second highest-grossing NC-17 movie, earning $40,433,119. Only $5.3 million of that take was domestic.
Kids (1995)
Shining Excalibur
If you were alive during the outcry over the release of Kids, you remember the endless think pieces it spawned: Was the Larry Clark film, written by Harmony Korine, just reflecting the realities of wayward Gen X youth? Or was it exploitative?
Either way, Kids introduced the world to future stars Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson (both above) and captured a grimy but beautiful hip-hop-indie aesthetic better than anything before or since. It holds a proud place on our list of ’90s Movies Only Cool Kids Remember.
Made for $1.5 million, Kids earned $23.5 million, $7.4 million of it in the U.S.
Please note the odd name of the distributor for Kids: Shining Excalibur Films. It was a company created solely to release Kids, because Miramax, which was owned by Disney had the time, had a policy forbidding the release of NC-17 movies.
(Also! Shining Excalibur was created by Miramax co-chairs Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Wonder whatever happened to those guys.)
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1990)
As universally respected as Helen Mirren is today — she’s you’re go-to if you need someone to play a prime minister or queen — it’s easy to forget that she had a run of very cool risqué films. The most daring of all was this one, which, as we mentioned earlier, helped make the MPAA (now called the MPA) see the need for the NC-17 rating.
The plot concerns that various people mentioned in the title coming together for a mix of graphic scenes and rigorously formal filmmaking. That’s just the kind of filmmaking that makes censors very, very confused, but tends to delight cinephiles and critics.
The MPAA have the film a choice between an X rating and being unrated. Its studio, Miramax, chose unrated, but the film was reclassified after the fact as NC-17, when that rating came on the scene just months after its initial release.
The film, by Peter Greenaway, earned $8.5 million, $7.7 million of it domestically.
Henry & June (1990)
Henry & June is historic: It’s the first film to receive an NC-17 rating by the MPAA. It tells the story of how author Anaïs Nin (Maria de Medeiros) pursues both author Henry Miller (Fred Ward) and his wife, June Miller (Uma Thurman). It is also the origin story of Miller’s first novel, Tropic of Cancer.
The Philip Kaufman film was critically acclaimed, and perhaps also benefitted from public interest in the new NC-17 rating. It earned $23.5 million, $11.6 million of it domestically.
Fans of Quentin Tarantino will note that the director cast both Medeiros and Thurman in 1994’s Pulp Fiction, and went on to cast Thurman in Kill Bill. Both films made a lot more than Henry & June.
Showgirls (1995)
We’ll go ahead and say something you would get ridiculed for saying in 1995: Showgirls is good. Director Paul Verhoeven went hog wild making one of our favorite kinds of film — a movie that does the same thing it satirizes.
Showgirls, starring former Head of the Class star Elizabeth Berkley (pictured) as a Las Vegas dancer who will do anything to succeed, including battle a nemesis played to the hilt by Gina Gershon, has an energy that’s hard to argue with.
It earned $20.3 million domestically, which unfortunately puts it in the bomb category. But it’s one of those bombs that is also a cult classic, and it has a very large following today, especially among people who appreciate camp.
The Last Tango in Paris (1973)
Last Tango in Paris was a sensation when it was released, becoming the seventh-highest grossing movie of 1973. The film follows a middle-aged man (Marlon Brando) who strikes up a clandestine relationship with a much-younger woman (Maria Schneider.)
Today the film is best known for a hastily-planned scene involving butter that left Schneider feeling violated by Brando and their director, the aforementioned Bernardo Bertolucci.
The film is also known for scoring the highest domestic gross of any NC-17 movie — it earned $36.1 million.
You’re probably wondering how the film could have an NC-17 rating when it was released in 1973 and the rating started in 1990. Great point! The film initially had an X rating, but was re-released with an R rating in 1981. Then, in 1997, the MPAA reclassified the original cut of the film with the NC-17 rating.
So Last Tango in Paris is the highest-grossing NC-17 movie domestically, but it took some twists and turns on the way to that distinction.
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Main image: Showgirls. United Artists.
