Vietnam's baffling, sex-free release of 'Fifty Shades' is a flop

Fifty Shades of Grey is not a good movie, but it is, at least, a movie with a whole bunch of sex. An edited version of the BDSM-themed romance has flopped in Vietnam, which maaaaay have something to do with the fact that every single love scene — minus some kissing — was cut from the release.

Naturally, there’s been plenty of controversy about the raunchy movie, at home and abroad: it was banned outright in Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and India. (In France, Fifty Shades was given the equivalent of a PG-13 rating, because France.) But Vietnam proved uniquely insistent on having its sex-cake and censoring it, too.

“A five-year-old could watch it,” an unhappy Vietnamese moviegoer told the Independent. “Even the trailer was sexier.”

Worse, given that a) a full 20 minutes of screentime are devoted to sex and b) the plot literally centers on the dominant-submissive sexual relationship between beady-eyed billionaire Christian Grey and inexplicably breathy college senior Anastasia Steele, it turns out that there’s not much left when you scrub out all the nudity, spanking, moaning, and so on.

Audiences were reportedly left confused and frustrated by the incoherent story that messily unfolded before them. Welcome to the Red Room, where I… do stuff. Sign this contract, which requires you to… do stuff.

Molly Fitzpatrick is senior editor of Fusion’s Pop & Culture section. Her interests include movies about movies, TV shows about TV shows, and movies about TV shows, but not so much TV shows about movies.