The romantics, the film aficionados, the ones left holding their girlfriend’s purse outside the ladies’ room. Though they were far outnumbered, they, too, were submissive to the hype. They were the men in Grey.

So what, exactly, attracted them to watch “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the movie based on the erotic novel whose target audience tends to have two X chromosomes?

Obligation, some said. “I didn’t have an option,” said Marcus Jackson, 23, who bought tickets this weekend as a Valentine’s Day gift for his girlfriend. “I figured the best part about it was the wait at the bathroom. No lines.”

Pure escapism. “We had a couple of hours and it was freezing out,” said Craig Barry, 51, who ducked into a 10 a.m. showing in Times Square on Monday with his wife, Kristi, 45.

Sentimentality. “Because the first time she started to read the book, we got a baby,” Ivan Perez, 33, said softly, smiling at his wife, Vanessa Jiminez, 30, before a 2:45 showing on Sunday.

But mostly, the men watching a movie that was not well received by critics and protested for its sexually abusive acts, but nonetheless consumed worldwide, attended for the same reason anyone else did — curiosity. Just as the promotional posters asked.

“Is it going to be so bad that it’s good?” said Matthew Akers, 29, a theater producer from Astoria, Queens, who was walking into the famed Ziegfeld Theater in Midtown Manhattan on Monday at 1 p.m. He added, “I know it’s not going to be an Academy Award film.”

At some New York City theaters, men appeared to be outnumbered about 10 to 1, though Universal Pictures, which released the film, said 32 percent of the North American audience was male. The more important number was $81.7 million, the film’s weekend box office take — understandable given the wild popularity of the E. L. James books on which the movie is based. The figure was projected to soar past $90.7 million by Monday night and seemed validation enough to spend $16 on a ticket.

“I saw the box office revenue it drew, and I figured all the people can’t be wrong,” said Angel Coven, 40, who sat in the 11:15 a.m. IMAX showing in Times Square on Monday without his husband, who had to work.

To accommodate the crowds, AMC Empire 25 in Times Square had multiple screens playing the movie at 45-minute intervals, from 10 a.m. to midnight on Monday.

Neal Vallins, 62, and his girlfriend, April Lee, 56, had planned to see the movie the minute it came out, but the first availability was for Sunday morning at the AMC theater on 84th and Broadway in Manhattan. (The theater was closed on Monday after a water main broke.)

“We loved it,” Mr. Vallins said, praising the film’s romanticism and the lip-biting leading lady, Dakota Johnson. He and Ms. Lee had read the book together.

Besides, Mr. Vallins added with a grin: “I wouldn’t trust her to see it by herself. I had to go.”

At the start of the 10:30 a.m. showing at the Ziegfeld on Monday, there were, oddly enough, just two people sitting in the 1,162-seat theater, and both were men. One said he was a producer for the “Late Show With David Letterman,” there because Ms. Johnson was due to appear on the show Tuesday.

Still, most theaters were full of women, several of them exclaiming not over Christian Grey’s abs, but over his incessant stalking. “Creepy,” one woman said to her friend.

There were guffaws and giggles over the dull improbability of it all, as when Ana Steele kept getting places to park directly in front of Christian’s downtown Seattle corporate headquarters.

Ms. Barry said her 18-year-old daughter already hated the movie. “She said, ‘Mom, I’m scarred for life,’ ” Ms. Barry said. She and her husband, who had not read the books, wanted to see why.

“I didn’t find it as erotic as I thought it was going to be,” Mr. Barry said. “In some ways I found it a little bit disturbing.”

Nelson Mendoza, 31, was disappointed, though, that it was bland compared with the novels. He had persuaded his girlfriend to see the movie on Monday, and afterward he was standing outside the ladies’ restroom, holding her purse and coat.

“The drama was there,” he said, “but they probably didn’t show as much as people would expect.”

(The New York Times)