There’s no bringing this one back to life. “The Bride!,” Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s “Bride of Frankenstein” riff from Warner Bros. Pictures, bombed this weekend at the box office, bringing in just $7.3 million domestic and $13.6 million worldwide against a reported $80 million production budget.
For Warner Bros., it ends a streak of nine straight movies for the studio that opened No. 1 at the domestic box office, with the most recent being “Wuthering Heights.” “The Bride!” fell to No. 3 in domestic theaters behind Pixar’s “Hoppers” and “Scream 7,” which took a hard plunge of 73 percent in its second week in theaters.
Though it had some ardent supporters, reviews for “The Bride!” were pretty bleak. IndieWire’s review called it a “retrograde” feminist punk opera that marries together “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Sid and Nancy” in an unholy mashup, and others called it an out and out mess.
An ambitious mess, yes, but the Film Twitter reaction was not kind, to say the least. Audiences didn’t respond to it either, saddling it with a C+ CinemaScore, though the Audience Popcornmeter at Rotten Tomatoes was a bit more generous than the critics, a 73 percent versus the Tomatometer score of 59 percent.
We just spent the better part of a year celebrating Warner Bros. and its film chiefs Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy for their big swings and originality, with audiences rewarding WB at the box office thanks to films like “Sinners,” “Weapons,” and “One Battle After Another.” The Academy is poised to recognize that originality too when one of “One Battle” or “Sinners” most likely wins Best Picture. “Wuthering Heights” was another major swing from a female director, a film with a period setting that blended genre into a pop pastiche, had a bold vision, a comparable budget, and similarly polarized critics and audiences, but that one has done just fine with $213 million worldwide and counting and should be a money maker for the studio.
Deadline reported that “The Bride!” could on the other hand lose close to $90 million. It lines up more with the titanic miss that WB suffered with “Joker: Folié a Deux,” and it’s not too far off from what Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” did around this exact same time last year. That movie had an even greater budget of $118 million, but it opened a little stronger at $19 million and finished with $133 million worldwide. We might call it a minor miracle if “The Bride!” wound up anywhere near those levels.
You can chalk up the lack of interest in “The Bride!” to some “Frankenstein” fatigue after Guillermo del Toro’s Best Picture nominee and “Poor Things” not long before that. The film was also delayed a bit, which may have been a silver lining to get it out of 2025 as Warner Bros.’ parent company was trying to negotiate a sale. And while “The Bride!” might not even be classified as a horror movie, there were other options for horror fans still in theaters with “Scream 7” and “Send Help.” There’s more than a few reasons why this one didn’t work.
The point is, “The Bride!” is the type of movie we want Warner Bros. (and eventually under the Paramount umbrella) to keep making and taking chances on. In theory, it’s the sure thing, IP plays that should help to bankroll the riskier, original bets. This year, WB has “Supergirl,” “Cat in the Hat,” “Mortal Kombat II,” “Dune: Part Three,” and “Evil Dead Burn,” but it also has the Tom Cruise movie from Alejandro G. Inarrítu, “Digger,” as well as David Robert Mitchell’s “Flowervale Street,” and J.J. Abrams’ “The Great Beyond.”
Could we have a conversation about whether a “Bride of Frankenstein” remix deserves an $80 million budget when the director’s first film, “The Lost Daughter,” was a $5 million indie drama? Of course. There was enough consternation about whether “Sinners” deserved that same level of budget too. And it was before that film’s success that De Luca and Abdy were on the hot seat in their role.
“The Bride!” won’t put them at risk before a merger with Paramount could threaten their standing, but It’s just a reminder that you’d rather have more big swings and misses like “The Bride!,” not fewer.
