Just once I’d like to see an erotic movie where someone tries the “caress with a feather thing” and end up getting a punch in the nose. Because that is exactly what would happen if someone tickled me with a feather.
“Why did you tie me up first?”
“Let me tell you a little story…”
Estimates for Friday is $8M. Down 74% from last Friday (including the Thursday “previews”). Might make $20-22M this weekend. After that, it will hardly take in any more money domestically.
There isn’t going to be a holdover audience for this one. Word of mouth is terrible. For a film that brings out infrequent movie goers, there’s often a slow decline. But those are usually older audiences. This one isn’t hitting that demographic.
I wonder when it will fall below The Imitation Game, which is number 9 heading into its 13th week.
Could be worse, could be Hot Tub Time Machine 2.
Not only is this not a big deal to the studio, it was expected by the box office predictor people.
Don’t forget that Christian and Ana are Edward and Bella. The dynamic between them is supposed to be the same, with BDSM replacing vampirism. (And, yes, Edward has a tragic backstory with how he became a vampire, and it made him different from the other vampires.) While it’s not as explicitly played in Twilight, Bella does sort of redeem Edward. James just took it further.
Note though that I’m taking what you said about James’s work from here.
Based on that description alone, I would assume the idea was that, since her fetish was BDSM, and she hadn’t encountered that (possibly due to repression), sex didn’t seem all that great to her. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, where you don’t think sex is good until you find your kink.
No no no no. You’re remember it wrong. It was what’s her face, Rosalie who had the tragic story about how she became a vampire.
Carlisle made Edward a vampire to save him from dying of the Spanish flu. Whereas he did it for Rosalie because she had just been gang raped by her fiance and his friends, and then left for dead. She was jealous of Bella because she never had the chance to get married and have kids.
Most of the Cullens have similiar backstories, in that they were made vampires to save them from dying.
God, I can’t believe I remember this shit. Thanks, I so wanted to forget those awful books. I blame you, BigT. It’s all your fault!
Exactly. Still 73 per cent is fairly steep. Personal anecdotal evidence from women who have seen it, the main target audience, particularly seem unconvinced by the male lead, who apparently lacks a lot of that “it” factor that Pattinson had.
Tony,
I think your understanding is actually very good. Much better than most and certainly better than mine. The OP said, “Nothing succeeds like success”. A corollary might be, “Nothing titillates like titties.”
See, here’s part of the problem. The Rotten Tomatoes indicator has “Jupiter Rising” at about the same level of critical approval as “50 Shades” (i.e., 25 percent for 50 Shades and 23 percent for Jupiter Ascending) and I saw Jupiter Ascending and I LIKED Jupiter Ascending. I didn’t think it was the best move ever, but damn, I liked it. So … I don’t trust the critics … and based purely on my own personal standards, I have every reason not to.
A lot of people may be waiting to watch privately at home.
50 Shades’ revenues DID drop by 75% between it’s opening weekend and it’s second weekend, as predicted, but you know what? It was still the No. 1 movie at the box office and made $22 million domestically. It’s total gross to date is over $400 million, ten times it’s $40 million budget. A monster hit, in romance terms, despite being enormously unpopular with the critics.
It can join the esteemed company of Police Academy 2; Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Batman Forever. Lucky them.
It wasn’t enormously unpopular with the critics. I’m not sure why it’s so important to you to believe that the big bad film critics hated this movie, but it’s not true. 50 Shades of Grey received mixed reviews from most of the major critics. Other recent movies like The Boy Next Door, Mordecai, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 got worse reviews than 50 Shades of Grey.
True, big grosses does not mean a film is good (or bad). Most of the comic-book based films I’ve seen prove this out. But it’s VERY unusual for a romance with strong sexual content, as they say, to make this kind of money. It gives me hope that other, better romances with strong sexual content will be made (kinky or otherwise). Hopefully, some studio exec’s eyes have been opened. It takes a lot of money to pry their little eyes open.
The current rating from the critics of 25% on the Rotten Tomato meter belies your claim. Now the AUDIENCE rating of 48% supports your claim … but I was talking about critics.
What baffles me is why he’s so determined to believe that the big bad movie reviewers desperately wanted the movie to fail.
They’re professionals who get paid to tell people what a movie (or book) is like. They know perfectly well that people have different tastes and that high quality is far from the only valid reason to go see a movie. They don’t *care *whether or not people go see it. Why on earth would they?
All of the other movies I named have worse Rotten Tomato scores than 50 Shades of Grey. Rotten Tomatoes also classes reviews as either “fresh” or “rotten”, so looking at the “Tomatometer” doesn’t reflect mixed reviews very well. However, the average rating for reviews by critics listed by Rotten Tomatoes is 4.2/10. Metacritic lists 50 Shades of Grey with a score of 46/100, which again is better than all the other movies I named. On Metacritic 29 of the 46 50 Shades of Grey reviews from the critics are classes as mixed. (I would also characterize all of the reviews of this movie that I’ve read myself as mixed.) The remaining reviews are split almost evenly between positive (9) and negative (8).
I note that you still haven’t been able to name a single movie critic who you feel was unfair in their review of 50 Shades of Grey, even though I specifically asked you about this in this very thread two weeks ago. It also remains unclear to me why you believe this movie should have received better reviews than it did when you haven’t even seen it.
Regarding the audience reaction to the movie, it has a Cinemascore of C- :eek:. For a scoring system where most everything is at least a B+, this is really, really bad.
Note that online audience scores such as RT and IMDb are incredibly unreliable. I’ve seen movies with a lot of audience “ratings” that weren’t even released yet. Cinemascore does random sampling of people who have actually seen the movie.
From the view of the publishing world, Fifty Shades of Gray is unique. It’s a six sigma outlier. Harry Potter is the only other phenomenon that equals it, but Harry isn’t as far ahead of other megateen hits as Gray is of other erotic romance.
My guess is that number two in sales is Sylvia Day, whose Crossfire series has sold, according to Wikipedia, 13 million. That’s a wonderful number. It’s also around 10% of the Gray trilogy. She is also not a name that has moved into the general public’s consciousness. Other names of bestselling erotica include Ava Claire, Jessica Clare, Mandy Baxter, and Emily Minton. They have one other thing in common: none of them has a Wikipedia page. Sure, that’s proof of the indictment that Wiki is biased toward men’s interests, and even E. L. James (Erika Mitchell) has the most minimal page possible, but it’s also proof of a narrow fandom.
What matters for the movies is that there is no built-in base of screaming fanatical fans for movies adapted from any other author’s books, unlike the YA’s world’s The Hunger Games and *Twilight *and Divergent. The studios will, of course, now rush to clone Gray. None will make $100 million U.S. gross. I’ll predict some of them may rise to the weekend hit level of a horror film. The top horror film of 2014 was The Purge: Anarchy at $72 million. That had a production budget of $9 million, which is why horror films are ground out weekly. If they can keep erotica down to those budgets using the same type of unknown, inexpensive actors, they will make money as reliable B-movies. Another huge hit? As doubtful in film as it is for publishing.