Valentine’s Day Comes Early With ‘Fifty Shades Darker’ Trailer And Ticket Sales Already Starting

With a full two months before it hits theaters, 50 Shades Darker, the sequel in the world’s most famous fanfic series, has released a new trailer and advance ticket sales are now available. Perhaps Fandango is hoping to have tickets bought as Christmas presents?

Back over Valentines Day weekend of 2015, the original 50 Shades of Grey set the weekend’s record with an $85 million dollar take – until Deadpool opened the same weekend this year and topped it with $132 million.

The last time around, advance ticket sales started in early January – so perhaps tickets will be available for the final installment of the series, 50 Shades Freed, as you leave the Shades Darker showings.

It will be interesting to see if the series’ trend continues with heavy advance sales going to regions of the country where the very behavior depicted in the film is so publicly derided. For the first installment relative to the average ticket sales nationwide, the top states as reported by Deadline which were most above the curve were:

Mississippi: 3.9x
Arkansas: 2.8x
West Virginia: 2.7x
Kentucky: 2.1x
Alabama: 2.0x
Louisiana: 2.0x
North Dakota: 1.9x
South Carolina: 1.8x
Iowa: 1.7x
Tennessee: 1.6x

Picking up from there Grey left off, Dakota Johnson’s young and inexperienced Anastasia Steele left her BDSM-loving boyfriend Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan), unwilling live 24/7 in his lifestyle. But as with stalkers everywhere, he just takes it as encouragement to push harder (where “No” means “Try Harder”).

Just so we can have some additional emotionally damaged scenes, Christian’s exes join the storyline, with Kim Basinger is the older, elegant Elena, while Pride & Prejudice & Zombies‘ Bella Heathcote is in the ‘Single White Female‘ role as Leila.

But for those who are looking forward to the second installment of “Unhealthy BDSM for Vanilla Beginners”, there’s the second official trailer: