Michael Bay’s five-film stint as the architect of Transformers might have something to say, but in terms of dollars to reviews, it’s not a stretch to call Fifty Shades the worst billion-dollar franchise that’s ever existed in the history of cinema.
Looking at the numbers, the saga that’s every bit as erotic as watching beige paint dry peaked with the 25 percent Rotten Tomatoes score of the original, before successors Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed earned an 11 percent approval rating each. That puts the average at a little over 15 percent, which did nothing to stop the menage-a-trois of awful adventures from netting upwards of $1.3 billion combined.
A Razzie win for Worst Screenplay was fully merited based on dialogue that absolutely wouldn’t come out of a real person’s mouth no matter how scintillating the circumstances, but it did at least miss out on scooping the prizes for Worst Director and Worst Supporting Actors, somehow managing to avoid the Worst Picture field entirely.
And yet, because anybody with half a brain and the faintest of pulses knows all too well that eroticism is irresistible to Netflix subscribers no matter how good or bad it turns out to be, Fifty Shades Freed has tied down and dominated the viewing habits of subscribers everywhere to wind up as the number one most-watched movie on the entire platform’s worldwide rankings per FlixPatrol.
A smattering of skin is clearly all it takes to get users rubbing their hands in glee, because there’s nobody out there watching Fifty Shades Freed for its technical or artistic merits.