Many film fans who stayed current on the latest productions were up in arms long before the film opened. Months of speculation on its content and production troubles resulted in numerous pieces written about it, although no one at all had actually seen it. A big studio making an “erotic film” was a huge deal, and naturally speculation turned toward whether the final product would be sexy, outright pornography, and/or a complete train wreck. The actual release of the film, when people finally got to see the finished product, did little to give a definitive answer. The only thing that seemed clear after the film’s wide release was that a Hollywood film centered on sex did not equal big box office. And so Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999, Warner Brothers) moved out of the spotlight and into infinite cinephile discussions, and no major American film studio dared to produce such a high-profile “erotic film” for well over a decade. Once they did, though, they struck gold: Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film adaptation of the E.L. James novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2015, distributed by Focus Features) opened with a commanding lead at the worldwide box office, marking the first time in a long while that a Hollywood studio had released a sex film that made both a whole lot of money and a major cultural impact.
