14 DAY TRIAL // “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the highly anticipated feature film based on the adult novel of the same name by E.L. James, the first in a best-selling trilogy, was a commercial hit but a disappointment in more ways than one.
The critics hated it, but so did the fans / readers of the book, who simply couldn’t accept the fact that only about 20 minutes of the entire film’s runtime was made up of love scenes, and those too were very vanilla and unsurprising. They were made to expect more, based on the source material.
Unrated version brings alternate ending
There’s no way to make up to the critics, but at least some of the fans will be pacified. On May 1, “Fifty Shades of Grey” comes out on Digital HD, and one week later, on Blu-Ray, and as you can see in the trailer below, Universal promises an unrated version with an alternate ending.
Since the ending can’t possibly be any other than the one we got in theaters (because that’s how the first book ends and this is the best way to set the premise for the sequel), that can mean only one thing: this version will include more scenes, preferably of the steamy kind.
Considering the uproar over how tame the R-rated version that ran in theaters was, this is the only logical conclusion: the unrated version will include more encounters between Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), or longer versions of those that did make the cut.
This was the plan all along
If you’ve been keeping an eye on “Fifty Shades” gossip and news, you probably know already that this was the plan all along. Back in November 2013, when the film hadn’t even started shooting yet, producers revealed that they were considering the possibility of releasing two cuts, so as to do justice to the source material and please as many fans as they could.
Under this plan, they would have released an R-rated and an NC-17 version in theaters, leaving it up to the fans to decide which they wanted to see. The latter would have been more faithful to the book.
However, an NC-17 rating is considered the “kiss of death” in cinema, so they eventually opted out of it.
Apparently, the plan wasn’t ditched completely, since the unrated version coming out in May could be just this, the NC-17 movie that should have come out in theaters.
This is just speculation at this point, but it’s enough to keep fans on their toes until May.
