It’s alive, but it’s not exactly showing signs of life.
“The Bride!,” director Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s punk rock, feminist reinterpretation of “The Bride of Frankenstein,” flatlined at the box office with $7.3 million domestically and $13.6 million globally in its first weekend of release. That’s a terrible result given that Warner Bros. spent $90 million to produce the R-rated film, not including a reported $65 million on marketing expenses.
Set in the 1930s, “The Bride!” follows a very lonely Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) and his undead love interest (Jessie Buckley) as deranged outlaws on the run. Middling reviews, frighteningly bad audience scores and a puzzling release date didn’t help the turnout for “The Bride!,” which landed wildly behind the studio’s projections of $16 million to $18 million domestically and $40 million globally. This ends a remarkable winning streak for Warner Bros. after a string of nine No. 1 hits, including “A Minecraft Movie,” “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “Wuthering Heights.”
Here, Variety autopsies five reasons why “The Bride!” failed to inject new life into the box office.
Inauspicious release date
“The Bride!” was originally scheduled to debut on Oct. 3, 2025, which made sense given its proximity to Halloween. There’s a reason that horror movies tend to thrive during the spookiest month of the year. So then why would Warner Bros. executives relocate a film where (spoiler alert!) the Halloween anthem “Monster Mash” plays over the end credits to a time as random as early March? Sure, this calendar placement has been favorable to the studio’s recent tentpoles, including “The Batman” and “Dune: Part Two.” (It helped that audiences actually liked those films.) But “The Bride!” might have done nominally better in theaters during the season of the dead.
Too much “Frankenstein,” too little time
One reason “The Bride!” was pushed to 2026 was to distance itself from Guillermo del Toro’s take on “Frankenstein,” starring Jacob Elordi as the stitched-together monster known as the Creature. That movie, which premiered last August at Venice Film Festival and landed on Netflix in November, has remained in the cultural conversation as an awards player. (“Frankenstein” was nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture.) Even though Gyllenhaal and del Toro’s movies were vastly different, the Gothic subject matter was too similar to be released just a few months apart. Hollywood, maybe it’s time to put a pin in Mary Shelley adaptations?
Budget gone wild
“The Bride!” cost way, way too much for an R-rated, genre-bending crime story with arthouse ambitions. When Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy began crafting their slate as Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chairs, they placed a big emphasis on expensive, auteur-driven swings. It paid off in the case of “Sinners,” an Oscar darling that generated $370 million globally against a $90 million budget. And much of the studio’s 2025 slate was populated by commercial winners, such as “A Minecraft Movie” and “Final Destination 6,” which generated some enviable profit margins.
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But, so far, their other gambles lost a lot of money: 2024’s “Joker: Folie à Deux” was rejected with $207 million against a $250 million budget; 2025’s sci-fi satire “Mickey 17” stumbled with $117 million against a $118 million budget; and “One Battle After Another,” another awards frontrunner, only generated $209 million against a $140 million budget.
In a note to press on Sunday morning, Warner Bros. defended the results of “The Bride!” by writing, “In an increasingly ‘risk-averse’ business like ours, we believe the business is better served with studios taking bold swings on originals like this one.” That’s true — and Hollywood shouldn’t stop investing in originality. But there has to be a way to take chances without betting the farm.
A press tour that forgot to sell the movie
Apparently, audiences don’t want to hear how the monster was stitched together. During the promotional circuit, Gyllenhaal spent a lot of time talking about the film’s tragic test screenings when she needed to be convincing the masses to buy a ticket. Meanwhile, her star, Buckley, was busy on the awards circuit as the frontrunner in the Oscar best actress race for “Hamnet.” Then again, there was probably a reason the cast didn’t want to do a ton of publicity.
Audience rejection
It’s as simple as that. Reviews were weak. But moviegoers were downright dismissive, saddling “The Bride!” with a “C+” grade on CinemaScore exit polls. When word-of-mouth is that lethal, there’s no amount of marketing magic or charming stories on late-night talk shows that can convince people to get off the couch. That’s the scary truth.
From Variety US