To say that Fifty Shades of Grey won the St. Valentine’s and President’s weekend box office contest would be a major understatement. The film adaptation of E. L. James’s erotic thriller – which has sold over 100 million copies and been translated into 52 languages – was a massive success, dominating all over the world. In the U.S., Friday to Monday, it generated over $94.5 million and obliged theater owners to add extra screens. 66% of its viewers were women, but on St. Valentine’s Day men also came in droves. And, contrary to some forecasts, the numbers were not just huge along the Coasts and in big cities, but also in the South and the “Bible Belt”. Moving out of the US borders, Fifty Shades was even more impressive. It took in $158 million on its debut weekend, and it was No. 1 in 55 of the 58 nations where it premiered. $21 million came from the U.K., Germany was second with 15, followed by France with 12, Russia with 10, Italy and Brazil with 9, Mexico with 8, then Spain and Australia and so on. Even if it had an R rating or its local equivalent, it was also the biggest opening of all time in 11 different markets and broke February records in many more. Not too bad considering that the reviews of the Sam Taylor-Johnson directed movie were in between mediocre and terrible. And that even if several feminist groups, some organizations concerned with domestic abuse and the Catholic Bishop of Cincinnati had called for a boycott, Fifty Shades is now going to be remembered for having recorded the biggest opening weekend ever for a film directed by a woman. It smashed the $69.6 million gathered by Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight.
After many difficult years, the success of Fifty Shades is a much welcome triumph for Universal Pictures, which invested barely $40 million in its production and is now credited for a brilliant marketing campaign. Yet there was still room for other studios and other movies, with an estimated $247 million take for all films in the domestic market. Kingsman: The Secret Service, a comic book adaptation with Colin Firth as a super spy, generated over $42 million domestically, a good $10 million above projections. Slightly below was The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in its second week of release, with a total so far of just over $100 million. And American Sniper is still the phenomenon that does not go away. The Clint Eastwood directed Iraq drama took another $19.4 million, good for fourth place. It also crossed the $300 million mark and is on the way to beating Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan as the most successful war movie of all time – even taking inflation into account. Overseas, the haul is now at about $80 million, a quarter of that from Italy alone.
Overseas it was also a good weekend for Fox’s Kingsman: The Secret Service. It won in three markets – Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand – where Fox’s production was not dominated by Fifty Shades. The Wachowski siblings’ Jupiter Ascending continued its drop and is now at an international cumulative of $59 million. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water got an extra $13 million in 29 countries. And then there is China, where The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies has reached $122 million. And where things have also been pretty good for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, which has generated $31.5 million and counting.
There was additionally room in China for the local picture Somewhere Only We Know, with an impressive $30 million debut. Elsewhere Big Hero 6, Taken 3, The Imitation Game and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb continued to do well, but this was Fifty Shades of Grey’s weekend, a game changer. And a production that has redefined many assumptions and challenged many rules. Sex was supposed to be poison at the box office. Turns out that the kinky sadomasochistic sexual games at the center of the story were instead a big draw, for both sexes, of any age and all over the world. It was also supposed to be too much of a risk to have a woman as the lead in a franchise. Fifty Shades of Grey has a female as its lead, Dakota Johnson. Not just that. It is based on a book written by a woman, E. L. James. It is directed by a woman, Sam Taylor-Johnson. No wonder that when Universal claims no formal decision to proceed with the rest of the book trilogy has yet been made, nobody takes the studio seriously.
Lorenzo Soria