At an advanced fan screening of Fifty Shades of Grey on February 6, director Sam-Taylor Johnson announced that the there will be two sequels to the film. This means that the other books in E.L. James’ Fifty Shades trilogy, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, have been confirmed for the big screen.
Though the film has yet to be released in theaters, numbers from advanced ticket sales have been enough to ensure that the full Fifty Shades trilogy will hit the big screen. According to Fandango Fifty Shades of Grey is the fastest-selling advance-ticket R-rated movie in the company’s fifteen-year history. Though the film was expected to do well in advanced ticket sales, the figures from some states are above and beyond predictions. Moviegoers in Mississippi have bought up 3.9 times more tickets than expected, with Alabama following closely with 2.8 times more tickets purchased than previously estimated. West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Carolina, Iowa, and Tennessee complete the top ten list of unpredicted ticket sales, displaying an affinity for the movie in the Southern United States.
With reports of the upcoming sequels, fans of the series can speculate how the split between books will be handled. Recently Hollywood Life reported that the final word in the film is “stop,” due to the demands of author E.L. James. This is contrary to what director Sam-Taylor Johnson wanted, which was to end the film with “red,” the infamous safe-word associated with the Fifty Shades trilogy. Where exactly this final word falls in the Fifty Shades timeline will not be known until the release of the film.
News of the high ticket sales and impending film sequels may cause little surprise in light of the rousing success that met the Fifty Shades trilogy during its release. The first novel, Fifty Shades of Grey, broke the record for fastest book to sell one million copies, beating previous sale records set by J.K. Rowling and Dan Brown. Additionally, Fifty Shades of Grey was the first EBook to sell over one million copies on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. The sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed met similar success, quickly becoming big sellers. As a whole the trilogy managed to outsell the Harry Potter series on Amazon UK.
Fifty Shades of Grey is set to hit theaters February 13, which, as advertisers frequently remind the public, is just in time for Valentine’s Day.
-By Guest Contributor Jordan Cheresnowsky