Notice: The trailer embedded below and some of the content of this article contain explicit material.
Buckle up ladies and gents: VR is about to get a little hot and steamy. James Foley, director of Fifty Shades Darker, stated on stage at VR on the Lot that he is creating a VR experience for the upcoming erotic romance film. Details are scarce on the project at this time, but it was described as full of lots “action” — which can be inferred to mean something quite different than epic fight scenes or car chases.
Foley has been keeping the cast of the film on set after filming the core film sequences to bring in a 360-degree crew for additional work. The experience will be fully live-action with characters from the film, all shot directly in 360-degrees. We’re not sure how long the experience will last — hah! — or what equipment is being used — double hah! — but it is sounding like a fully-fledged high-quality Hollywood production. However, this has been described as a piece of promotional marketing material, meaning the exact degree of nudity and sex in the experience could be lower than the film itself.
For those blissfully unaware, the Fifty Shades series of books (by E. L. James) and films feature two main characters locked in a torrid love affair: Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey. Steele (played by Dakota Johnson) and Grey (played by Jamie Dornan) reprise their roles for the second film in the series. I used the phrase “erotic romance” very deliberately earlier, as the first film in the franchise, Fifty Shades of Grey, featured just about as many on-screen sex scenes as it did non-sex scenes.
Virtual reality can be used for lots of amazing and powerful things — one of which is porn. Interest in the topic is reaching all-time highs on the internet and former adult star Sasha Grey even explained that she felt VR porn was “too in your face.”
Regardless of whether or not you enjoy the books and films for what they are — poorly written, poorly acted, hot, steamy, arousing romance stories that could arguably be described as high-production value pornography — this is good news for VR. The bigger names and properties that get involved, the better off our budding new industry is in the grand scheme of things.
Fifty Shades Darker releases in theaters on February 10th, 2017.
