Fifty Shades Darker

After of a month of the weekend box office being dominated by Split, the arrival of three new major releases has finally given the top 10 a thorough shake-up. As expected, The LEGO Batman Movie led the pack, with Fifty Shades Darker and John Wick: Chapter 2 following. And while each film opened strong, only two of them feel like unqualified successes.

'Fifty Shades of Darker' comes out today.

Apparently the press tour for Fifty Shades of Grey in 2015 was just much too sexy, because Universal has slapped a gag order right onto the faces of the Fifty Shades Darker stars, forbidding them from making any sorts of innuendoes while promoting a movie about sex, lies, and BDSM.

Taylor Swift's duet with Zayn, "I Don't Wanna Live Forever," has been rising up the charts, but Taylor herself had NEVER heard it on the radio. Until today, that is. So, naturally, she had to share the experience with all her Swifties.

For most people, the decision to make a sequel to 2015’s Fifty Shades of Grey is probably the punchline to a bad joke. But have you actually stopped and looked at the box office numbers for Fifty Shades of Grey recently? We’re not talking about $100 million at the global box office; we’re not even talking about $200 million. We’re talking about $571 million worldwide, more than Mad Max: Fury Road and Creed combined and the eleventh highest-grossing movie of the year. With those kind of numbers, you pretty much have to make a sequel. I don’t blame them.

The '1989' singer-songwriter and the 'Mind Of Mine' solo star team up for a brooding, shadowy visual for their 'Fifty Shades Darker' theme song.

Halsey's 'Fifty Shades Darker' song, "Not Afraid Anymore," premiered on January 13.

It’s every woman’s fantasy: not the perfect man, but the man who is perfect in all ways except one, which can only be changed with the gentle touch of a lover. Anastasia Steele, the Dakota Johnson-played protagonist of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, shares this widespread fixer-upper fetish, and she makes as much clear in the new trailer for Fifty Shades Darker. In the film disappointingly not titled Fifty-One Shades of Grey, Ana accepts Christian back into her life under the condition that he cut it out with all the brooding angst that originally attracted her to him and got old pretty quickly. They let one another back into their lives (and beds, and red-lit sexual torture chambers), but tragedy may cut the honeymoon phase short.

Tracking movie trailer views can’t be an easy task, as you have to somehow combine everything from TV views to YouTube views to all-kinds-of-other-places views and calculate some sort of number from all of that. Previously, the record has been held by The Force Awakens, which was dethroned by Fifty Shades Darker earlier this fall, which was then whipped by the live-action Beauty and the Beast trailer (probably the most anticipated live-action Disney movie ever). Now, The Fate of the Furious is king, with 139 million views in its first 24 hours, more than 10 million more than Beauty and the Beast.