'Fifty Shades Freed' Pushes The Trilogy Past $1 Billion Worldwide Opening Weekend
Universal/Comcast Corp.’s Fifty Shades Freed earned $18.5 million on its first Friday of domestic release, including $5.6m in Thursday previews. That’s down an understandable 14% from Fifty Shades Darker ($21.4m last February) and -38% from the boffo $30m opening day of Fifty Shades of Grey back in Feb. of 2015. One slight cause for concern is that Fifty Shades of Grey earned 28% of its Friday business on Thursday and Fifty Shades Darker earned 26% on its Friday business on Thursday, while Fifty Shades Freed earned 30% via Thursday previews. Should this third offering crashes due to frontloading, there might not be a sequel! In all seriousness, this is a $55 million trilogy capper to a series that had already earned $952m worldwide ($571m for the first film and $381m for the second) on a combined budget of $95m. So, no matter how far above the $1 billion mark this series gets, Fifty Shades Freed...