Thread by @FoldableHuman

So, I have yet to watch the extras on the Fifty Shades blurays. Time to watch them all back to back.

If you're wondering why I haven't, despite the depths of the rest of my research, it's because they all sound like crappy EPK garbage. "Oh, yeah, we're super happy to be working on this, uh, this, uh, project!"

First up: Tease of Fifty Shades Darker.

30 second teaser trailer that uses footage shot in Jamie Dornan's hotel room, and not footage from either movie.

Alright, I just realized there's actually, like, 20+ 90 second character vignettes on the first disc alone, so I'm not gonna tweet all of them.

Alright, I thought the vignette on Christian's Apartment was going to be dreadful, but it's actually a really solid BTS look at building the apartment set and the work of the set decorator and production designer.

Fun fact: I assumed the view out Christian's windows was composited, but it's actually a series of photo backdrops matching time of day.

Lol, the code name for the first movie was The Adventures of Max & Banks

Since the name of the production is going to be on permits and stuff it's to mitigate how many fans show up when you're shooting in public.

https://twitter.com/ThatAdamKid/status/1062443129993920512

Even shooting Hudson we had to be careful not to let out that we were at the Heartland set with Heartland actors because swarms of people would show up. Even then people still showed up b/c it's impossible to hide the fact that *something* is shooting at Maggie's.

Also in this BTS featurette EL James just described the playroom as "womb-like"

The feature "E L James and Fifty Shades" starts off with Erika's fake version of where Fifty Shades came from, claiming that she wrote a fanfiction, and while writing that "got the idea for Fifty Shades".

Alright, there's all the Grey special features watched. I'm now very curious for the contrast to Darker's. Also it's worth noting that Kelly Marcel didn't appear in the Grey features at all.

Two very pointless deleted scenes.

The "Writing Darker" feature starts with E L giving an actually accurate origin story.

It's, uh, incredibly telling that the two main special features are focused on the new writer and director.

Grey writer/director profiles "fantastic vision, really creative ideas"

Darker writer/director profiles "really got along with Erika"

This "Change in Direction" feature is 50% justifying Erika hijacking the production and acting as proxy writer/director.

It's also telling that Dakota and Jamie are much, much, much less present in these features after the previous film's BTS had a long, glowing interview all about how much they trusted STJ to handle the sex scenes with delicacy, how safe they felt.

On that subject, the final feature on the disc was talking about the sex scenes and Dakota Johnson doesn't mention James Foley once, it's all about her leaning on Jamie to be her advocate on set.

By Freed the special features are pretty anemic. Two deleted scenes, three features, and some music videos.

I'm sorry. One deleted scene. The detail of Christian giving Ana a bunch of hickeys in revenge for her taking her top off on the beach. It's bad.

Like, it was already a bad scene in the book, but the staging is really bad. Jamie and Dakota start laughing at the end of one take.

Addendum, what looked like one feature, "The Final Climax" is actually a header for 9 things.

These menus are pretty bad.

There's a fascinating drift in these features that I'm going to try and mention in the video.

The costume director from the first film is possibly my new favourite person, this delightfully eccentric guy who spent an entire video talking about communicating characters' emotional states through subtle outfit details.

The secondary creative team that they talk with in Darker and Freed are basically "we wanted something really expensive that would surprise the fans."

This is one of the features with Mark Bridges if you want to see what I mean.

Why it's interesting to me is that the things secondary creatives want to talk about when the BTS crew interviews them, it tells you what's on the top of their minds, what kinds of conversations are they having over and over, what's the creative atmosphere like.

The Final Climax is really, really boring.

There's only one left, a 9 minute conversation between Erika and the guy who plays Jack Hyde, and those 9 minutes feel like a mountain right now.