Tag: Fifty Shades Of Grey

It’s safe to say 2015 has been one of the craziest years ever in terms of box office history. If you haven’t been paying attention to movies at all this year, first of all, why weren’t you on this website and secondly, why are you on this website now?

You may have heard a record or two thrown around in your every day life but in reality there are more than a handful new records for both the best and the worst films ever.

And because the best stories are rags to riches, I think it is appropriately if we start are way on the bottom and work our way up.

Here’s looking at you, kids.

Not making a lot of money when you only open on a dozen or less screens is expected. Unless you are The Grand Budapest Hotel, you will only get several thousand bucks. What is important in tracking failure is for the movies that don’t make a lot but open a wide release in the US. Usually the metric that people care about is at least 2,000 theaters across America. You probably never heard of Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure or Delgo, but they are the number 1 and 2 worst openings ever for films that have reached 2,000 theaters and have been there for a few years now. Those are both animated films.

Instead, this year we received We Are Your Friends, a live action movie with Zac Efron about electronic dance music. It opened to a measly $1.76 million. It was the worst live action opening of all time (that wasn’t a re-release). Unfortunately, it couldn’t even hold on to its fame for that long. Just two months later, two more films on the same weekend decided to suck harder. Rock The Kasbah had only $1.47 million and Jem and the Holograms $1.38 million. Before this year, the live action winner was P2, a shitty thriller from 2007 and even that made at least $2 million.

If we change our standards, November saw the worst live action film opening of all time with at least 2,500 theaters. Victor Frankenstein, starring Professor X and Harry Potter, managed to win that title.

Just for getting the whole picture, there are two other great movie mentions. United Passions is the story of FIFA, starring Tim Roth, and it came out right when FIFA was being bombarded with corruption claims. It opened to only 10 theaters and made $607 its opening weekend. Even better, it made only $9 in Phoenix, meaning in the first three days only one person decided to burn his money and waste his time.

More recently, a small time thriller named Momentum opened up to also 10 screens in the UK. It’s opening weekend take translated to about $69. Ouch. And that one had Morgan Freeman in it.

I heard she was competing against the bear in The Revenant for Best CGI Female.

Overall, not as many films can be represented in the best money makers, because it is hard to get people out of their couches and into the theaters. With VOD and high food prices and shootings, people would rather stay in their homes. And yet, here we are, studios making bank.

The biggest winner of 2015 (so far) is Jurassic World. This film is part of a franchise that, realistically, only had one great film with Jurassic Park and two average sequels. But nostalgia and a return to the park at the right time in the summer was the key to its success. The most important record it broke was the Biggest Opening Weekend Domestic, with $208.8 million, just a hair over The Avengers at $207 million. It also won Biggest Opening Weekend Internationally and of course, Biggest Worldwide Opening Weekend. .

Jurassic World finished third all time in the domestic box office, only about $6 million behind Titanic. It was the fastest to reach basically every milestone you can think of monetarily.

But a new challenger approaches. Most people think that Star Wars: The Force Awakens, coming out this Friday will break all of the records Jurassic World crushed and more. There are even official odds for record breaking potential and plot points, because who doesn’t like to gamble. I know I do. I made a bet with someone that it wouldn’t beat the 3 day weekend Jurassic World domestic record. I am probably going to lose $20 now. Mostly because it has broken pre-sale records and other ridiculous things.

The hype is running this film to the ground. No matter how good it actually is, I can’t imagine anyone speaking bad about it for months. It is like they forgot The Phantom Menace hype and disappointment. Some people just want to set themselves up for sadness, I guess.

And the CGI for John Candy is absolutely stunning here.

Now, Jurassic World isn’t the only film to make money this year. A handful of films broke a billion worldwide, and a lot of films became surprise successes with relatively low budgets.

The biggest winner overall, hands down, is Universal Studios. Jurassic World, Furious 7, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Minions all broke $1 billion worldwide, and outside of Avengers, all three of them come from Universal.

It was the fastest studio to ever reach $1 billion (domestic) in only 165 days. As of August, it had over $5.5 billion from its films, making it the best year a studio has ever had. I don’t know its official end of year numbers now, but basically every movie they released was a box office smash. They had the best of luck with Straight Outta Compton, Pitch Perfect 2, Fifty Shades of Grey and Everest.

Their only loose end was Jem and the Holograms. Yes, the biggest dud of the year. But with profits like that, they wouldn’t even bat an eye at the film.

And Pitch Perfect 2 wasn’t even the best Anna Kendrick musical this year!

The main purpose for this article is to highlight how extreme the box office numbers were from this year. With overall theater attendance going down, it is refreshing to see such high box office totals for a wide variety of films. People might be going to the movies just as often as before, but they are also refusing to see anything that may be bad or mediocre. That is what Redbox and Netflix are for after all.

2016 is looking to be the first year mostly controlled by super hero films, with roughly 1,000 being released and no more Hunger Games. I can’t imagining anything being as high or low as this year has turned out to be.

Thanks for reading!

Let’s start with the obvious.

Literally everyone at this point knows that Fifty Shades Of Grey started out as some sort of Twilight fan fiction. People liked it, she changed the characters names a bit, gave them some new jobs and that was about it. Literally even the setting is the same. When watching, I could easily imagine Edward and Bella in each scene. The mannerisms, whatever. Yeah.

Either way. That is besides the point.

The other thing I heard about Fiddy Shades is that it is a poor portrayal of BDSM subculture and what this movie really promotes is sexual abuse and lies. Oh good. Perfect date night film then. There are also issues with the rating itself (which I will get to later) and apparently the director and book author argued a bunch on set.

I’m sorry, I can’t hear your criticisms over these chiseled abs and bare skin.

Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) met under unusual circumstances. She interviewed him at his company because he was going to be giving the commencement speech at her graduation. He is a billionaire. She is a senior English Lit major who is doing the interview for her sick roommate (Eloise Mumford). But he sees something in her and she mostly just thinks he is hot.

However, she is also very inexperienced. Despite having average looks, she is a virgin, saving herself for the one she really wants. Fuck this pretense. Christian wants to spank dat ass, and Anastasia doesn’t know what she wants, outside of the fact that she wants Christian’s body too.

So he gives her a taste. Like, a dick taste. But does that get her hooked? No, not really. She knows about what he really wants, and he makes it perfectly clear. He has a contract, things up for negotiation, everything laid out on the table. But she doesn’t want a contract, she wants their relationship instead to be confusing and “normal” where things can happen without rules. In fact, the whole film she just leads him on instead, refusing to sign the contract, not because she doesn’t want to, but because she keeps going back and forth. Not that changing your mind is bad. But refusing to come to a decision for weeks is kind of annoying.

Also featuring the Grey-clan, like Marcia Gay Harden, Max Martini, and Rita Ora. I have been told the last person is a singer.

Grey isn’t the only color in the movie. Unless Red is a shade of Grey. I don’t know, I don’t “see color.”

First of all, I am definitely disappointed in the R rating. Boooo. You might wonder why? The only way it can go higher is the dreaded NC-17 rating, which major movie chains refuse to show! Only indie art house theaters! Well, obviously, an erotic novel for adults only with very graphic sex scenes should be that rating in movie form. But also, this was like, our ONE chance for the major movie chains to change their opinion. They know this is going to make money. They wouldn’t refuse a film version when the book was so hyped up. They would have caved and maybe we would have gotten more NC-17 movies in theaters in the future.

But yeah, missed opportunity.

As for the abuse part? I looked very hard. Christian never does anything to Anna that she does not agree to. Never. Sometimes it takes convincing, but real adult people are allowed to discuss things. Yes he is more experienced, but like in real relationships there will usually always be someone more experienced. If convincing someone to try new things sexually is abusive behavior, then man, I’d imagine most relationships are abusive.

At the same time, this doesn’t really put a good spotlight on the BDSM community, known for being very high on communication. Why not? Christian follows their rules pretty well it seems (despite Anna’s best attempts to muck things up), but they also made him an abused figure in his past who came from a crackhead mom. So they are also painting the picture that BDSM is “not right” and clearly it is due to bad experiences in his youth. Shit, looks like they are also trying to burn all bridges here.

Anyways, Dakota Johnson was very believable in her role, I guess, even if she is stupidly annoying the entire time. The character’s actions rarely make sense to me, but she acted great in it. Dornan had the serial killer look down I guess, but I thought he overacted his part.

In all reality, I thought the movie was okay for the most part. But the ending was down right terrible. Terrible in a “Hey, fuck you guys, you don’t get a complete story in this one, you have to watch two more movies to get a complete story.”

Cliffhangers are one thing. They can work well for a series. But if that series can’t even complete a fucking basic arc, then it is just filler pointlessness. I don’t know anything about how the rest of this story goes, but if it is like the first one, then I can safely assume it probably should have just been one movie and not fucking three.

Also, there were no dicks in the movie. Some bush on both ends, and maybe the start of a shaft once. This is what I assume you all really wanted to know.