Up to the week of 50 Shades of Grey release I was seeing the film like many have an adult erotic thriller like Basic Instinct or Gone Girl with box office experts continually raising their expectations of the opening.
A few weeks before its release was predicted to open with £5m in the UK to beat last year’s Gone Girl then £6.5m to beat the previous biggest 18 rated film opening Hannibal in 2001. Then on its opening day Friday February 13th expectations were for £10m+ but its opening shocked and amazed everyone with the news on Sunday evening it was estimated to open with £13.6m by Monday dropping down to £13.2m.
The film success follows on from the recent Chic Lit films of Twilight, The Hunger Games and The Fault in Our Stars and 50 Shades has much more in common with those films from the way the film has been marketed and hyped and sold to women than your typical erotic thriller.
The film received massive hype similar to a Twilight and Hunger Games with a similar marking campaign.
It is a fantasy film like Twilight and The Hunger Games but what it failed to do unlike those films that had strong female characters Anastasia Steele is far more submissive to Christian Grey than Bella Swan or Katniss Everdeen were in their films they wouldn’t allow themselves to be put in the position Anastasia allows herself to be in.
The other major issue with 50 Shades is the power is always in Christian’s hands as seen by the double standards of nakedness that features within the film. As many reviews have mentioned there was much Johnson but no johnson. While Dakota is naked through much of it Jamie keeps his trousers on. For a film based on a women’s novel, screenplay written by a woman, directed by a woman, strong female case aimed at women for a film to not have johnson shot will disappoint many as many women have been fantasying about that ever since they read the books why would they want to see Dakota naked?
After its massive opening was always going to become the biggest 18 rated film in the UK but the big question was how big it would drop which was 66%. That drop doesn’t compare anywhere near the drops of 18 films it took over from The Wolf of Wall Street and Gone Girl but more like Twilight which it has much more in common with that those other films or any other 18 rated film.
As 50 Shades of Grey originally started out as Twilight fantasy porn called Masters of the Universe with Edward Cullen and Bella Swan who developed into Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele into the book 50 Shades of Grey experts who analysed both books have concluded that Shades is 89% of Masters of the Universe so it is no wonder it opened so strongly and is dropping also fast just like Twilight films did.
Normally a film would expect to do over three times its UK opening (10+ years ago it was a lot more) so 50 Shades of Grey would of expected to take £40m but with the step drops last weekend and more so this weekend will be highly unlikely.
| Second weekend drops | |||||||||||||
| Film | Year | O W/E | 2nd W/E | Drop | 2 W/E T | final BO | % of o w/e | ||||||
| Sex and the City | Ent | 2008 | £8.76m | £3.08m | 65% | £16.06m | £26.4m | 33.1% | |||||
| Twilight: New Moon | eOne | 2009 | £11.68m | £4.30m | 63% | £20.32m | £27.4m | 42.6% | |||||
| Sex and the City 2 | WB | 2010 | £6.14m | £2.47m | 60% | £13.65m | £21.6m | 28.4% | |||||
| Twilight: Eclipse | eOne | 2010 | £13.76m | £3.39m | 75% | £22.09m | £29.7m | 46.3% | |||||
| Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 1 | eOne | 2011 | £13.91m | £4.57m | 67% | £23.10m | £30.7m | 45.3% | |||||
| Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 | eOne | 2012 | £15.85m | £5.34m | 66% | £26.97m | £35.8m | 44.2% | |||||
| The Wolf of Wall Street | Univ | 2014 | £4.65m | £3.60m | 23% | £10.90m | £22.2m | 20.9% | |||||
| The Fault in Our Stars | Fox | 2014 | £3.34m | £1.69m | 51% | £6.69m | £10.5m | 30.8% | |||||
| The Maze Runner | Fox | 2014 | £2.03m | £2.92m | 29% | £1.45m | £8.8m | 23% | |||||
| Gone Girl | Fox | 2014 | £4.10m | £3.06m | 25% | £9.82m | £22.1m | 18.5% | |||||
| 50 Shades of Grey | Univ | 2015 | £13.27m | £4.56m | 66% | £25.2m | £31m e | 43% e | |||||
Above chart shows most people will be celebrate 50 Shades of Grey becoming biggest 18 film in less than 10 days than the complete box office runs of The Wolf of Wall Street and Gone Girl but only thing they have in common with is film certificate as audience is completely different.
Final box office estimate at £31m+ opening will account for 43%+ of its final box office. Have a better understanding this weekend with opening of two major releases Focus and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel both likely to open with more than third weekend of 50 Shades of Grey.
The soundtrack had second biggest debut for a film soundtrack selling 258,000 copies; biggest was 2009’s Michael Jackson film This Is It sold 373,000. The biggest multi-artist soundtrack was 2005’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ sold 317,000 in its first week.
Ellie Goulding’s ‘Love Me Like You Do’ featuring on the soundtrack stayed number 1 for a third week selling more than 118,000 copies already the fastest-selling single of the year; setting a new UK audio streaming record with 2.58 million listens in past 7 days and on Spotify it has been streamed 15,468,762 times to date.
In week before release Universal Pictures announced plans for sequels but in last couple of days E.L James has demanded script control for sequels disappointed a lot of her dialogue from her book was replaced by Kelly Marcel and seeing how Gillian Flynn was able to do screenplay for Gone Girl wanted to get her crayons out and as Universal never signed off on sequels before 50 Shades opened they will as Walt Disney did with P. T Travers give into her demands for sequels.
Kelly Marcel previously wrote script for Saving Mr Banks so maybe she will go on and write instead Saving Mrs James instead?
There were two expected news stories that would come from the release of 50 Shades of Grey
1) Cinema screening 50 Shades of Grey instead of children’s film as was done in the US last week when it was screened instead of The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.
2) A woman was arrested for masturbating while watching it in a cinema in Mexico. Reminding me of the infamous Tweet by Anna Kendrick talking about Ryan Gosling while she watched Gangster Squad. These actions are now frowned on in cinemas especially since the Cannon Moulin Piccadilly cinema closed in 1990; famous for showing classics triple bills films like American Girls in Heat, Women of Pleasure and Sweet Body of Bianca.