Look, I get why they made a sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey.

It made 571 million worldwide on a 40 million dollar production budget.  I get how the movie industry works; green-lighting a sequel probably seemed like an absolute no-brainer. But…

:pause:

Actually, hold on a second. While writing this up I came across something in Wikipedia that amused me.

In June 2012, the film company Smash Pictures announced its intent to film a pornographic version of the Fifty Shades trilogy. entitled Fifty Shades of Grey: An XXX Adaptation.^[210] A release date of January 10, 2013, was announced.^[211] In November 2012, Universal, which had secured the Fifty Shades film rights, filed a lawsuit against Smash Pictures, stating that the film violated its copyright in that it was not filmed as a parody adaptation but “copies without reservation from the unique expressive elements of the Fifty Shades trilogy, progressing through the events of Fifty Shades of Grey and into the second book, Fifty Shades Darker“.^[212]

Now there’s a question for the ages: how do you do a pornographic parody of a movie that is essentially a parody of pornography? Apparently it’s harder than it looks; as I understand it, the parody porn studios almost never lose these kinds of cases. That they eventually settled and agreed not to make a parody of this one is pretty interesting. …Of course, the real problem there? The porn-actual-porn version might have had better acting.