This last Sunday, The Guardian ran a feature profile of Irish actor Jamie Dornan, and the article inevitably shifted focus toward Dornan’s upcoming role in February’s Fifty Shades Of Grey film adaptation. He commented on the ignominious reputation of the source material and the pressures that come with bringing such a popular work to the screen, but one comment in particular made ripples across the Internet. When asked whether he’d bare a little more than his soul in the Fifty Shades film, Dornan admitted, “There were contracts in place that said that viewers wouldn’t be seeing my, um... todger.” 

Dornan’s statement caused quite a stir across social media, and not just because of his absurd U.K. euphemism. One faction bemoaned Hollywood’s dilution of the original novel, reminding executives that many Fifty Shades fans came to the original for the primo dongle action. Another faction speculated that co-star Dakota Johnson would go full frontal for the film and united in outrage over the industry’s sexist double standards with regards to male and female nudity.

But the revelation that Dornan’s penis would not play a supporting role in the film represents but the first sentence of the writing on the wall for Fifty Shades. Sam Taylor-Johnson’s picture was doomed before the ink on her contract finished drying, and her leading man’s dick just tipped over the first domino in a long, inevitable chain of failure.

Here’s the thing: From the start, Fifty Shades was pretty much unadaptable. Readers flocked to the book in droves because it afforded them a discreet way to indulge their kinkier side in a safe and nonjudgemental environment, whether that be the comfort of home for ink-and-paper purists or, for e-reader owners, the morning commute to work. Giggly murmurs of “You actually read it?!” proved fine fodder for gossip among friends, but ultimately, the novel was an insular experience. 

Such will not be the case when Fifty Shades slinks into neighborhood cineplexes. Viewers hoping to get an eyeful of the sadomasochistic games between Anastasia Steele (yikes) and Christian Grey (yikes) will have to first go through a line for tickets and another to enter the theater. Because fortune is a cruel mistress, they will most likely see their first-grade elementary school teacher or local pastor. They will be faced with the choice to fib about their plans for the evening or to hunker down for an excruciatingly awkward conversation. And even if viewers traverse all that and avoid major incident, the cold hard fact remains that they will then have to take in material designed to elicit sexual excitement in a room full of strangers. Even in the best-case scenario, it would’ve been weird.

So the studio had no option but to tone down some of the crazier sexual content (y’know, like displaying the human body in a movie about people fucking). Dornan was fully aware of this, too. Another quote from the Guardian piece: “You want to appeal to as wide an audience as possible without grossing them out. You don’t want to make something gratuitous, and ugly, and graphic.” Except that Fifty Shades only grew into the phenomenon it’s become due to its gratuitous, ugly, and unflinchingly graphic content. Without the hair-raising BDSM, it’s conventional rom-dram about two annoying people who overcome their complete incompatibility in order to find love. It will not be good.

Topsy-turvy as it may sound, lack of fidelity to E.L. James’ original novel will hobble this film. The book is nearly unreadable—literally, some sections defy traditional reading methods—but at least James’ passion for her subject material is evident in her work. The film adaptation will suffer from a refusal to get any skin in the game, literally and figuratively.