4. The Marketable Soundtrack
One of the strangest credits on the film is Danny Elfman's, for scoring the mess. Here's Tim Burton's live-in collaborator, creator of The Simpsons theme and the score to the good Spider-Man movies, slumming it with a cast and crew only involved to boost their career. It's a rather strange credit in and of itself, too, given that on the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Elfman has only two short pieces tacked on the end. In case you hadn't realised, Elfman isn't here for his impressive composing pedigree. Instead, his inclusion is emblematic of Fifty Shades Of Grey's general approach to commercial movie-making - merge the marketing of a film explicitly with its creative side. There's been lots of tie-in merchandise of varying degrees of officiality (the best has to be laundry detergent Fifty Shades Of Surf), and this soundtrack is just another arm of that, chock full of chart-aiming tracks to further boost the film's profile. Unlike more traditional pop-based soundtracks, which featured songs "inspired" by the film (and thus didn't need to have the songs included in the film proper), Fifty Shades goes all in and shoehorns the songs by Beyoncé and co. into the movie, creating another reason for people to see the film ("Like the song? See the film!"), although also making the whole thing feel like a music video compilation in the process.