Fifty Shades (film series) the second, "Fifty Shades Darker", was released on February 10, 2017. "Fifty Shades Freed", the third film, was released on February 9, 2018. Worldwide, the series has grossed over $1.320 billion, making it the fourth highest-grossing R-rated franchise of all-time. Two years after the trilogy's first novel was released, several distribution companies had bid for the rights of the trilogy. Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount and Universal, as well as Mark Wahlberg's production company, put in bids for the film rights. The winning bid went to Universal Studios and Focus Features, at $5 million. With James gaining control over the process
Fifty Shades Darker (film) and found fault in the change in directors, stating: Some of the greatest Hollywood melodramas (such as Douglas Sirk's "Magnificent Obsession") featured plotlines of an even more extravagant absurdity than that of "Fifty Shades Darker". Their extreme artifice became a framework for extreme ideas and extreme emotions, even in an era of extreme public reticence about what goes on in the bedroom. The freedom of the current age of sexual explicitness invites realms of characterization—and of intimate imagination—that the first film in the "Fifty Shades" series hints at and the second one utterly ignores. "Fifty Shades Darker"s indifference to its