An awful lot of women who enjoy BDSM had an interest in bondage, blindfolds, flogging, D/S, from a rather young age, so that doesn’t sound weird.
I haven’t read more than the freebie from Amazon (and didn’t care for the writing), so I can’t speak to the plot. Will probably watch it when it hits HBO/Showtime/Skinamax.
Also, I’ve heard that 50 Shades being praised because it gets women talking about fantasies. I cannot imagine the conversation with friends when they talk about wanting to be spanked and I suggest that a flat hairbrush works nicely if you get bored with a hand.
Wouldn’t even touch discussing cutting, breathplay, or gunplay, and I don’t know if they would be shown in a movie.
And the 51st flavor is…
But seriously, I think you just wrote the next South Park episode.
didn’t read, didn’t watch, saw this review
Fifty Shades of Grey is brilliantly hilarious. But it’s not clear if this was intentional.
Agreed, except, in the first book, Ana is presented as a vanilla virgin, a woman who has had little or no interest in sex, and therefore has had none. There is no hint that she has indulged in BDSM fantasies or had BDSM impulses prior to meeting Mr. Grey. That is a little weird, but not unbelievable. She might have repressed or not understood her fantasies. Still, going from “no sex, no interest” to whippings and paddlings and fucking oh my! with Mr. Grey in short order … well, relatively short order, as I often point out to those who insist that 50SG is porn, you’re eight chapters into the first book before Ana gets so much as kissed …
It’s an interesting point. I feel Grey falls short of being a monster because he always offers Ana, and all of his prospective play partners, a choice. They can sign the contract detailing what sort of activities they agree to participate in with Grey or not. He uses safewords. He practices birth control. I had the impression that prior to Ana all of Mr. Grey’s partners were pro or semi-pro submissives (i.e., prostitutes). He doesn’t use blackmail or anything like that. Not very monster-ish.
In fact, when he first learns Ana is a virgin his first instinct is to back away from her, he’s deeply disappointed because she’s not who he thought she was, which I guess would be a semi-pro submissive.
Now, given that he’s a billionaire, he can offer inducements that make blackmail kind of unnecessary … very early in his relationship with Ana, he gives her a new car, a rare book, a nice computer, and makes it very clear to her that she is to think nothing of them. But really … what new college grad from a middle class background is likely to think nothing of such things?
Now, what makes you think Grey is a monster?
Good lord. Did the hormones fairy miss her entirely? Is that possible? Common? Normal?
Now I’ve wandered into medical questions and away from kink.
It would only have done half as well except that it was a date movie and most men didn’t realize until after they saw it that it could have been avoided if they had a safe word.
The fact that a bad movie is successful is nothing that new or interesting (IF it is a bad movie. I don’t know. I understand director Sam Taylor has some decent cred with movies like Nowhere Boy.) Michael Bay makes gigantic blockbusters all the time, for instance.
The way it may affect future productions does interest me a lot. Will the pairing of two R-Rated box office hits like Grey and Sniper make the studios stop caring so much about age ratings from now on? Will we see the rise of female-oriented movies with bigger budgets and better marketing? Will the next years see an increase of adaptations from popular book series that allow for franchises? Or at least more editorial successes like Gone Girl? Or will they skip the editorials and go for popular internet novelizations, like the Wormverse?
The fact that it originated as Twilight fanfiction was enough to prejudice me against it. 
I’m hoping that the movie studios get the message that kink is now box office, if it’s done right. That is, maledom/femsub and kinda mild. No edgeplay, for example. In Skinamax softcore films, which are the closest thing there is to the erotic romance genre that Fifty Shades is part of, most of the time when there’s a scene of someone getting tied up, it’s the guy. But in erotic romance and traditional romance, too, it’s the women who gets tied up when there’s any tying up being done, almost all the time. Hollywood should look HARD at erotic romance if they want to replicate 50 Shades’ success, but moviemakers as a class are, well, not to put too much of a fine point on it … dumb.
I doubt that. The occasional somewhat erotic yet successful flick happens every decade or so. Last Tango didn’t make skin flicks mainstream, neither did 9 1/2 weeks or Basic Instinct. If you look at the marketing, 50 Shades was very careful in pretending it was a fairly standard romantic movie. If you didn’t knew from the book, the trailer would never make you think there’s even nudity. In fact, for all I know, there isn’t.
I’m sorry, but BDSM will still be a niche interest after this. I’m not opposed to it, just saying, we’ve seen movies like this before.
What I do think will happen will be studios paying close attention to what people is reading.
Why choose? Give me the budget, and I’ll make you a movie where a dominatrix ties up and spanks guys, and a dominant Christian Grey type ties up and spanks women, and they meet and get smitten – but who’s going to dominate whom?
Imma call it Dom And Dommer.
Just a word of advice, if you ever make Dom and Dommer To, don’t wait twenty years.
OK, that’s just evil! 
I do not think those earlier phenomena were anything LIKE on the scale of "Fifty Shades, which has sold over 100 million copies worldwide. A couple of years ago a rival publisher claimed that their sales were tanking because Fifty Shades was distorting sales for the entire adult fiction market. I think the movies you cited were big waves, but Fifty Shades the book was a fricking tsunami. It’s not the same thing.
You really think the people who went to see Fifty Shades had no idea what the subject matter was going to be? (See: tsunami.)
See: tsunami. I think FSOG represents a major shift in women being willing to represent their true erotic interests by purchasing the erotic materials they actually like, rather than what publishers think they should like … a byproduct of the publisher-free publishing environment we now enjoy thanks to Amazon. Remember, Fifty Shades was a bestseller BEFORE a publisher got its hands on it.
Have to disagree here, too. Look at SF. Although some well-known writers have done all right for themselves (Gibson, Heinlein) what we get from Hollywood is mostly Dick, Dick, Dick and more Dick … and by that I mean of course, Philip K. Dick. Now Dick is hardly an unknown writer, but he’s just not All That compared to, well … everyone else. But his books sure have been made into movies a lot! I think it’s because their “is it all a dream?” structure resonates with filmmakers. It sure isn’t because he was a super-giant SF writer, because, well … he wasn’t.
In other words, porn for women.
Again, I’m really sorry, because I can see that you really want this to happen, but that just proves my point: one is an anomaly, you need two to start calling it a trend. There’s just never been a second grey-like phenomenon just like there never was another Harry Potter, just a bunch of unsuccessful imitations.
I think they had an idea that the subject matter would be heavily diluted, according to the marketing campaign, yes.
I do think there will be more and more media devoted clearly to female audiences- I just don’t think that the shift will be towards erotica of any kind.
There are PKD movies. None of them is really a successful franchise. The successful sci-fi flics are Marvel movies, Star Trek, Star Wars… movies with a strong fanbase.
It is not a terrible film. Mark Kermode thought that some critics had unfairly decided what they were going to say before they saw it. It is also not a great or even good one. Two stars, maybe. Dakota Johnson gives a much better performance than some of the execrable dialogue deserves; I agree with this quote from the Telegraph’s review:
But it does bring up sayings about sow’s ears and purses.
There were unsuccessful imitations after Harry Potter, but it’s because the movie studios released them hoping for them to be successful franchises. Here’s a list of some of the Harry Potter hopefuls.
I could definitely see movie studios grabbing up the rights to other erotic romance books and hoping for the next 50 Shades of Grey type franchise. Those movies might be unsuccessful both critically and commercially, and maybe no franchises will start, but I wouldn’t be surprised by at least a few imitators being made.
And the advantage for the 50 Shades clones is that the budgets can be fairly cheap, as opposed to the Harry Potter clones. The budgets for the Harry Potter clones was between $40 and $180 million, while 50 Shades was made for $40 million, and other romance stories could be made for a lot less. So even if the imitations aren’t huge blockbusters, they can still be financially successful, which might encourage more to be made.