Ben Child 

Fifty Shades of Grey beats Avatar with $248m opening weekend box office

Adaptation of BDSM romance scores 21st best debut of all time and highest-ever opening for an 18-certificate film in the UK
  
  

Jamie Dornan in Fifty Shades of Grey.
Glasgow kiss … three women were arrested at a Scottish screening Photograph: Focus Features/Everett

Fifty Shades of Grey made $248.7m (£161.6m) at the worldwide box office at the weekend – the highest global debut of 2015 so far and the 21st biggest opening of all time.

Sam Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation of the bestselling EL James knee-trembler about a kinky Seattle billionaire and his sceptical sex slave also took the biggest-ever US debut for the President’s Day long weekend, with $90.7m. In the UK and Ireland, its $21.5m haul was the highest for a film with an 18 certificate, with similar achievements pulled off in Germany, Russia, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Australia, Philippines and New Zealand.

The $248.7m global take was better than the $241.6m total achieved by Avatar, which went on to be the highest-grossing film of all time, in 2009 (though previews and early openings mean Fifty Shades is counting a potential five-day take against Avatar’s three-day weekend). In recent years, only big-budget fantasy movies such as The Avengers ($392.5m), Iron Man 3 ($372.5m), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part One ($273.9m), X-Men: Days of Future Past ($262.9m), Transformers: Age of Extinction ($302.1m) and The Dark Knight Rises ($248.9m) have performed better.

However, most of those films benefited from huge audience turnouts in China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest markets. The Fifty Shades books were unpopular in Japan and the film version is unlikely to get a release in conservative China, so Taylor-Johnson’s movie had to work hard in other territories.

With a budget of just $40m, experts had been predicting a haul of around $110m worldwide for Universal’s film, so the final total will have taken the studio by surprise. The gargantuan haul means sequels, based on James’ follow-up novels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, are now inevitable. Commentators are also predicting the movie’s success could usher in a new wave of copycat erotic fare, with studios rushing to green light their own films aimed at a similar marketplace.

James’ books have sold more than 100m copies worldwide, so the film retained a ready-made audience. And it has triumphed despite negative publicity surrounding the author’s spats with Taylor-Johnson over dialogue, and often scathing reviews. The movie currently boasts a rating of just 26% “rotten” on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, while the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw handed out a on- star review and suggested the performances by Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson were “strictly daytime soap”.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who owns rival studio 20th Century Fox, was quick to deliver his own verdict on the formula for Fifty Shades of Grey’s success.

In Glasgow, three women were arrested at a Valentine’s Day screening of the film when they glassed a man who asked them to keep their noise levels down. The Daily Record quotes one witness, who had booked in for the subsequent screening, reporting that the ushers need to wipe blood from the seats and vomit from the aisles before they could go in.

“Besides being the worst film I have ever seen,” said Michael Bolton, “ three women were getting arrested and put in a police van when we arrived.”

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