Box office Fifty Shades Darker grossed $114.5 million in the United States and Canada and $266.5 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $381.1 million, against a production budget of $55 million. It earned $5.72 million from Thursday night previews at 3,120 theaters, down from the $8.6 million grossed by its predecessor two years prior, but still the sixth-best Thursday preview gross for an R-rated film. The film made $21.5 million on Friday, down 30% from the first film's $30 million opening day, but topped the box office that day. It went on to debut to $46.6 million, down 45% from the first film's $85.1 million, and finished second at the box office behind
The Lego Batman Movie ($53.0 million). The film grossed $11 million on
Valentine's Day, marking the second-highest amount for when the holiday fell on a weekday, behind
The Vow ($11.6 million in 2012), and bringing its five-day gross to $61.5 million. In its second weekend, the film grossed $20.3 million, again finishing second at the box office behind
The Lego Batman Movie. This marked a 56.5% drop from its first weekend gross, and was only $2 million behind the amount the first film grossed in its second weekend ($22.3 million), only that marked a drop of 73.9% from its respective debut. In its third weekend, it grossed $7.7 million, dropping to 5th at the box office. Outside North America, the film was simultaneously released in 57 countries, and was expected to gross $115–155 million over its first three days. It ended up grossing $97.8 million in its opening weekend, the fourth largest R-rated international opening of all time. Its top grossing locations included Germany ($11 million), the United Kingdom ($9.7 million), France ($8.7 million), Brazil ($7.5 million), Italy ($6.8 million), and Russia ($6.7 million).
Critical response Much like its predecessor,
Fifty Shades Darker received unfavorable reviews from critics, who criticized its screenplay, narrative and Dornan's and Johnson's performances. On
review aggregation website
Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 11% based on 209 reviews, with an average rating of 3.23/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Lacking enough chemistry heat or narrative friction to satisfy, the limp
Fifty Shades Darker wants to be kinky but only serves as its own form of punishment." On
Metacritic, the film has a score of 33 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale, an improvement over the "C+" earned by its predecessor, while
PostTrak reported filmgoers gave it an 82% overall positive score and a 68% "definite recommend". Vince Mancini of
Uproxx acknowledged the film's flaws, but said watching the film was enjoyable, noting, "Narrative sloppiness aside, as an outsider, sitting through
Fifty Shades Darker was a reasonably diverting experience, odd, dumb fun made even more fun by an audience that whooped and shouted at the screen during sex scenes. I didn't really get it, but I enjoyed the feeling of them having fun, though at two hours plus, it's a bit of a slog."
Manohla Dargis writing for
The New York Times expressed similar ambiguous opinions regarding the content of the film, stating: I was still rooting for Ms. Johnson in
Fifty Shades Darker, even if it proved tough going. Once again, the story involves the on-and-off, tie-her-up, tie-her-down romance between Anastasia Steele (Ms. Johnson) and her billionaire boyfriend, Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), a guy with sculptured muscles, expensive playthings and dreary issues. Stuff and kink happens: A gun is fired, a would-be rapist is punished and Anastasia is bound hand and foot. Mostly, she advances and retreats (repeat), mewls and moans, and registers surprise each time Christian tries to dominate her outside the bedroom, evincing the kind of stalkerlike behavior that usually leads to restraining orders. Richard Brody of
The New Yorker described the film as inferior to the first, 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 Darkers indifference to its characters' identities, conflicts, and desires is matched by its indifference to its own cinematic substance. The film's bland impersonality is grotesque; its element of pornography isn't in its depiction of sex but in its depiction of people, of relationships, of situations that, for all their unusualness, bear a strong psychological and societal resonance. There's nothing wrong with
Fifty Shades Darker that a good director couldn't fix.
Accolades ==Sequel==