Have Your Say: FIFTY SHADES OF... Why?!

Some success stories surprise more than others, but in the past year, few successes were as surprising as what happened to the Fifty Shades... trilogy of erotic novels. What started life as amateur SM-tinged Twilight fan-fiction turned into a worldwide phenomenon and became a hype of epic proportions.

With the huge popularity of the books, the success of the (first) movie adaptation should probably be less of a surprise. Or should it? Because the box office results for Fifty Shades of Grey are nothing short of staggering. Last weekend, the total worldwide ticket sales gross whooshed past the 500 million dollar mark, with change to spare.

Erotic cinema has had its ups and downs (hurhur), but the old rule that "sex sells" often turned out not to be true at all. Many studios gambled on erotic thrillers in the wake of Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct, but few managed to cash in on it, and as a fad it disappeared fast from theaters.

Truth be told, erotic cinema, and indeed porn, enjoyed its theatrical success in the past mostly because there was nowhere else to watch it. Television wouldn't allow it, and the Internet didn't exist yet. Only when video had its boom in the eighties, did porn start to move out of the cinemas and into our homes in earnest, where it could be seen without all those other creepy people around.
These days, we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, on-line or on a coded adult television channel.

Me, I'm definitely not opposed to titillation, but I'm not sure if I'd go to a cinema specifically for it. So why do so many people go to see Fifty Shades of Grey, which is very similar to the Playboy Indigo Entertainment and other "Skinemax" films of the last fifteen years, in a cinema?

What do you readers think? Is erotic content still a reason to visit a theater?
And if so, why?!

HAVE YOUR SAY, and show your opinions in the comments!