By Fifty Shades Freed smashed (relatively) the box office this weekend, propelling the franchise past a billion dollar box office. While the third installment saw a 17 percent drop off from the last film, and a 54 percent drop off from the original, it still did great for the third movie of a trilogy whose cultural moment passed before the first movie even came out.
The audience was a whopping 75 percent female, of which 55 percent were under 30, and 53 percent were white. Those are some dominant demographic numbers right there. So that begs the honest question, why? This isn’t a good film, the romance is tepid at best, the actors have little chemistry, and the sexy stuff is not actually sexy. You could call it escapism, but why would you want to escape to something so terrible? Why do you like it so?
Chasing behind Fifty Shades was another crummy movie in Peter Rabbit, which coupled with the stellar Paddington 2 flopping makes me worry about the general state of parenting in the world. I suppose I just have to be happy that Jumanji has finally fallen out of the top two slots so I don’t have to dig around for new images of that film anymore.
1. Fifty Shades Freed – $38,806,000
2. Peter Rabbit – $25,000,000|
3. The 15:17 to Paris – $12,600,000
4. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – $9,825,000
5. The Greatest Showman – $6,400,000
6. The Maze Runner: The Death Cure – $6,000,000
7. Winchester – $5,050,000
8. The Post – $3,500,000
9. The Shape of Water – $3,000,000
10. Den of Thieves – $2,870,000
