Fifty Shades (film series)
film series based on the novels by E. L. James

Fifty Shades is a film trilogy based on the Fifty Shades trilogy by English author E. L. James. It is distributed by Universal Pictures, and stars Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as the lead roles Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey, respectively. Sam Taylor-Johnson directed the first film, and James Foley directed the second and third films.
The first film, Fifty Shades of Grey, was released on February 13, 2015, while the second, Fifty Shades Darker, was released on February 10, 2017. Fifty Shades Freed, the third film, was released on February 9, 2018. Although the films were poorly received critically, the series grossed over $1.32 billion worldwide, making it the eighth highest-grossing R-rated franchise of all time.
Development
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 Pictures and Focus Features, at $5 million. With James gaining control over the process of the making of the film, she hand-picked Dana Brunetti and Michael De Luca as the producers.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fifty Shades (film series)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.