Fifty Shades of Grey brings in $81.7 Million

Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast (CCV: NYSE) long waited movie, Fifty Shades of Grey, has finally hit movie theatres. The adaptation of a best-selling novel depicting a business man’s kinky relationship with a university student was a blast at the box office.

Fifty Shades of Grey opened this President’s Day Weekend with $81.7 million in tickets and is now at the very top pf US box office charts. The film stars Dakota Johnson and James Dorman as the couple.

This film shattered what Kingsman: The Secret Service which took in $35.6 million this past weekend. Coming in third place on the box office charts was SpongeBob Movie: Out of Water which raked in $30.5 million in theaters in the US and Canada.

Fifty Shades got nice support from a Valentine’s Day opening after being released earlier in 57 foreign markets. The movie took in another $158 million overseas bringing its grand total, so far, to $240 million. Early screenings in the US, on Thursday night, raised $8.6 million. This helped set up the record breaking opening for this past weekend.

President of Universal’s domestic division, Nick Carpou thanked Valentine’s Day and a long holiday weekend in the United States for sales. He also said there was “intense interest” from small and mid-sized markets. All of these factors boosted sales and helped the movie obtain record setting sales numbers.

There were high pre-sales numbers in Mississippi and Kentucky which showed very high, almost uncommon, interest in Fifty Shades of Grey.

Sales in the northeast were affected by more snow. There was also inclement weather in the south-central region of the United States which effected sales. If there was no snow, no inclement weather, sales could have exceeded what we saw over President’s Weekend.