Have you ever had a crush on somebody? Like, you see them in the school hallway and you just think she (or he) is just the cutest, and so pretty, and attractive to boot? And then one day, you wake up and realize that she (or he) is kind of a jerk?
Yeah, the audience’s relationship with Fifty Shades of Grey is a little like that.
Oh, sure, the titillating blockbuster still won the weekend’s box office crown. It still collected an estimated $23.2 million. But the bloom is off this sadomasochistic rose, it would seem.
Fifty Shades lost 73% of its audience from the previous week—a practically historical rate of fan erosion. In fact, when you look at movies playing in more than 3,000 theaters, only the 2009 Friday the 13th remake had a more cataclysmic week-over-week loss.
But that saggy follow-through probably won’t be enough to prevent inevitable sequels from trundling out to theaters in a couple of years. The movie still made $130.1 million in just two weekends worth of work, and studio execs figure that the next two installments should be good for another vacation home or two.
Much of the rest of the box office had a fairly familiar look this week. Kingsman: The Secret Service again took the weekend’s silver medal, collecting $17.5 million. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water repeated in third place, absorbing another $15.5 mil.
Two newcomers closed out the Top Five. Disney’s inspirational pic McFarland USA, sprinted to an $11.3 million weekend for fourth place, while the teen-centric comedy The DUFF cajoled its way to fifth-place, $11 million stanza. These two freshmen flicks pushed American Sniper out of the Top Five for the first time since mid-January. Sniper—which was nearly shut out at the Oscars, by the way, earning just a single trophy for Sound Editing—has earned $319.6 million now, which is quite the consolation prize.
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 finished a distant seventh with $5.8 million, making the salacious sequel an unadulterated bomb. I imagine its makers wish they had a time machine of their own so they could go back and unmake this thing.
Final figures update: 1. Fifty Shades of Grey, $22.3 million; 2. Kingsman: The Secret Service, $18.3 million; 3. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water; 4. McFarland, USA, $11 million; 5. The DUFF, $10.8 million.
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