As much as taste is subjective, there aren’t many billion-dollar trilogies to come along that can justifiably be deemed worse than the Fifty Shades adaptations, each of which was panned into the ground by critics and blasted by its own target audience for not being sexy enough.
Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Freed, and Fifty Shades Darker landed respective Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 25, 11, and 11 percent from critics, which averages out at a franchise median rating of less than 16 percent, and you can’t say it’s not entirely deserved.
However, there were enough paying customers willing to sit down in the theater – and then peel themselves off the seats when the credits rolled – to propel the tiresome literary saga to a monstrous $1.3 billion haul at the box office, ensuring that profitability wasn’t an issue in the face of widespread panning.
Proving herself to be just the same as the rest of us, author E.L. James admitted in an interview with The Times that she was completely caught off-guard by the success of her novels, especially when the feature-length blockbusters were at the height of their popularity.
“The success of Fifty Shades still confounds me. I was like a rabbit in the headlights. I didn’t expect such a furore and didn’t deal with it well. I couldn’t sleep and was anxious, especially around the time of the movies. All I’d done was sit down and write something I’d have wanted to read, an erotic and fun romance. At the heart of my books are the characters and their relationship, which I really care about. End to end bonking would be pretty boring.”
To be fair, the “end to end bonking” was pretty boring, but she’ll have still made a killing off the movies, despite the fact every single one of them was thoroughly terrible in its own unique way.