150 million copies of Fifty Shades of Grey were sold world wide by 2017.
Just to compare that.
- 90 million copies of Game of Thrones have been sold.
- 150 million copies of Lord of the Rings have been sold.
- 500 million copies of Harry Potter have been sold.
Fifty Shades of Grey 166% the lifetime sales of Game of Thrones, tied with Lord of the Rings and 30% of Harry Potter.
That also was on sales from 2012-2017, meaning in five years, they surpassed the 70 year lifetime run for Lord of the Rings and surpassed US sales of the Bible, which average 20 million copies a year.
It was also one of the most profitable movies ever.
- 570 million was how much the first movie made in theaters.
- 40 million was the budget.
- 381 million was the sequel.
- 55 million was the budget.
- 372 million was the final fIlm.
- 55 million dollar budget.
To put some perspective on this, the first Fifty Shades of Grey movie made only 15 million less the first Iron Man movie, 100 million more than the first Thor movie and 200 million more than the first Captain America, despite having a budget of under 35% of all of them.
This really just begs the question. What made this franchise such a hit?
Studying this, it’s important to look at the books author, E.L. James.
James had the idea for Fifty Shades in 2008, after being a 45 year old woman obsessed with Twilight, who during a self described midlife crisis, began writing Twilight erotica fan fiction.
Fan fiction seems kind of weird to a lot of people, but globally, over 100 million people actively read fan fiction, with Harry Potter alone having 680,000 reported pieces of fan fiction published online.
The biggest website for fan fiction is Archive, which in January 2021 crashed, getting 1.4 billion visits in a single month.
E.L. James was fairly early on for Twilight fan fiction and while numbers haven’t been disclosed, she did have some following online as the biggest fan fiction author for Twilight.
The next factor is the erotica space as a whole is the highest selling book genre in the world, pulling in 1.4 billion in yearly sales.
That’s nearly 2x the second highest, which are detective books selling 770 million a year.
This shows the market size and goes to the biggest factor, the kindle.
Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, selling 90 million units.
That’s not factoring in knockoff products or iPads, which came out in 2010 and also used for reading.
Fifty Shades of Grey had a giant market advantage, being one of the early adult books in the e-book era, where people could more discretely read erotica and sales have gone up for that genre since.
Obviously, looking at a franchise, there’s the story, branding and characters, but for market factors, Fifty Shades of Grey was at the right time with e-books and the early sales channel worked, converting fan fiction to original content.