From Box Office Mojo:

Friday Report: Moviegoers Submit to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ by Ray Subers Fifty Shades of Grey had a strong first place debut on Friday, though Kingsman: The Secret Service was no slouch in second. Playing at 3,646 locations, the big-screen adaptation of the insanely popular novel Fifty Shades of Grey opened to an estimated $30.2 million yesterday. That ranks fourth all-time among R-rated movies behind The Matrix Reloaded ($37.5 million), The Hangover Part II ($31.6 million) and American Sniper ($30.3 million).

From the Washington Post in 2012:

12/07/2012

Random House employees get $5,000 bonuses, thanks to ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

By Caitlin Dewey Random House CEO Markus Dohle announced at the publisher’s Christmas party on Wednesday that he would award $5,000 bonuses to every member of his staff, from “top editors to warehouse workers,” reports the New York Times. Random House employees have author E.L. James to thank — her erotic novel, “Fifty Shades of Grey,” sold more than 60 million copies and has spent 37 weeks (and counting) at the top of the New York Times’ paperback best-sellers’ list.

As commenter Hippopotamusdrome points out this giant bestseller started out as fan fiction on a website for Twilight fans.

Ross Douthat writes in the NYT today:

The Caligulan Thrill

FEB. 14, 2015

Ross Douthat IN a society where almost every cultural phenomenon ends up interpreted through an ideological lens, the success de scandale of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — the books, the movie, the branded cuffs and whips — has left culture warriors a little bit confused. Is this another transgressive breakthrough — the latest blow to whatever remains of traditional morality, the mainstreaming of a lifestyle long locked away from view? Or is the now-famous story, with its alpha male gazillionaire and his punished female prize, actually a reactionary fairy tale, encouraging submission to the latest version of the patriarchy? The answer, of course, is a little of both, which is also the secret to the books’ success: In their not-exactly-literary pages, the central tension of the sexual revolution is finessed, tamed and happily resolved. Viewed from one angle, the sexual revolution looks obviously egalitarian. It’s about extending to everyone the liberties — the freedom to be promiscuous, to pursue sexual fulfillment without guilt — that were once available only to privileged cisgendered heterosexual males. It’s about ushering in a society where everyone can freely love and take pleasure in anyone and anything they want. But viewed from another angle, that same revolution looks more like a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited. This is the sexual revolution of Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt and Joe Francis and roughly 98 percent of the online pornography consumed by young men. It’s the revolution that’s been better for fraternity brothers than their female guests, better for the rich than the poor, better for the beautiful than the plain, better for liberated adults than fatherless children … and so on down a long, depressing list. At times, as the French writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry recently suggested, this side of sexual revolution looks more like “sexual reaction,” a step way back toward a libertinism more like that of pre-Christian Rome — anti-egalitarian and hierarchical, privileging men over women, adults over children, the upper class over the lower orders.

Note that the institutional memories of both Christianity and Judaism (and perhaps Islam) go all the way back to the ancient world in which homosexuality consisted largely of the strong taking advantage of the weak or the weak being aroused by being taken advantaged of by the strong, which helps account for the religions’ traditional objections to homosexuality.

Are we so sure that ancient approach won’t come back?

… The hope, in other words, is that we can eventually have the fun of Rome without all the nasty bits: Contraception and abortion will pre-empt the inconvenient infant, age-of-consent laws will make sure that young people’s initiation doesn’t start too early, and with enough carefully drawn up regulations for initiating intercourse we can all experience the courts of Tiberius and Heliogabalus without anybody getting hurt.

And if any member of a favored class suffers a broken heart or embarrassment or friendzoning they can sue or persecute or make up stories about members of the unfavored of class of straight white men. Everybody’s happy!