LOS ANGELES

IS the party about to fade for R-rated movie trailers?

Over the last two years, movie marketers have flooded the Web with R-rated video ads known as “red band” trailers. While most trailers are approved for broad audiences, the red-band variety typically features profanity, nudity or other material deemed inappropriate for children. A new one for “Get Him to the Greek,” a forthcoming comedy from Universal Pictures, depicts actors romping with a sex toy and an explicit sequence involving the smuggling of drugs in a body cavity.

You are supposed to be 17 or older to watch an R-rated trailer, and most theaters refuse to run them. But the Web has proved extremely hospitable to them despite a difficult-to-enforce industry rule that restricts their release to sites that use age-verification tests.

From 2000 to 2006, studios released a total of about 30 of these trailers, according to industry estimates. Last year, the studios released 76.

Movie marketers love red-band trailers because their titillating content is catnip for young consumers — the precise audience they try hardest to reach. Web sites like MySpace have welcomed them because they drive traffic and leave an aura of cool. And studios are trying to persuade more mainstream sites, like Apple’s iTunes, to lift a ban on red band trailers.