Fifty Shades of Grey looks set to drive all before it at cinemas this weekend with a debut of around $110m (£72m) worldwide, according to box-office pundits. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s adaptation of the EL James bestseller about a kinky billionaire and his willing experimental sex slave is on course to take $60m in the US and $50m across the rest of the world, suggests the Hollywood Reporter. Yet it is unlikely to challenge the $110m north American haul secured last month by box-office phenomenon American Sniper over the Martin Luther King Jr Day long weekend in the US, when Clint Eastwood’s war biopic moved to a wide release in US cinemas.
The film will open in more than 60 countries – including the UK, Australia, Canada, France and Germany – this weekend, but has been banned in Malaysia and looks unlikely to screen in the Middle East.
Such is the popularity of the trilogy of novels, which have sold more than 100m copies worldwide and been translated into 51 languages, that the movie adaptation is treading uncharted box-office waters. Reviews have so far been middling, with many critics suggesting the property works better onscreen than in print, but others struggling to hide their derision. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, in a one-star review, described the movie as “the most purely tasteful and soft-core depiction of sadomasochism in cinema history”. The film currently has a rating of 44% “rotten” on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.
Nevertheless, James’s fan base alone ought to be enough to carry the movie past $100m. But the author and Universal Studios may have to embark on two proposed cinematic sequels without Taylor-Johnson, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The British film-maker signalled her willingness to make a second film in an interview with USA Today earlier this week, but the Reporter hints she has been left bruised by regular battles with James over dialogue and sex scenes, and will not return to the director’s chair. “We’d often clash and have to find a way to work through that to get to some sort of resolution,” Taylor-Johnson said. “It was not easy. But we got there. I think both of us felt it was an incredibly painful process.”
Fifty Shades of Grey has come under fire from Christian groups in the US for its salacious content, and has received R and 18 ratings in the US and UK respectively thanks to its BDSM leanings. Yet in France censors have decided it is tame enough to allow some preteens to see it. Handing the film a 12 certificate, president of the ratings board Jean-François Mary said the feature “isn’t a film that … can shock a lot of people” and described it as “a romance, you could even say schmaltzy”.
In the UK, fire service providers said they were braced for an increase in incidences of people getting stuck in handcuffs or “rings”. The London Fire Brigade, which has responded to 393 similar calls since April, advised people to use “common sense”, but always phone 999 in a genuine emergency, according to the BBC.
