JOHN NOLTE: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Ultra-Woke Frankenstein Flick The Bride! Bombs at Box Office.
Useless Sycophants in the Entertainment Media, did you see what we didn’t do? What we didn’t do is what you useless sycophants did with Melania. We didn’t wishcast by writing piece after piece about how Bride! would die at the box office. Why? Because I try not to make a fool of myself, and one of the easiest ways to make a fool of yourself is to predict the box office with such certainty — which is what you useless sycophants did with Melania, something all Normal People thank you for.
So, The Bride!…
Writer, director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! cost around $100 million to produce and at least another $60 to $80 million to promote, and it’s about to become an iconic box office bomb with an opening weekend in the $7 to $10 million range.
The Bride! had everything going for it. A big star in Christian Bale, the hottest actress around in Jessie Buckley (who’s about to win a Best Actress Oscar), a massive budget, plenty of promotion, a wide release in over 3,300 theaters, an appealing genre, and a 61 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes thanks to critics who didn’t really like the movie but found a way to pretend they did to prove their fealty to the Woke Gestapo.
So what went wrong…?
Well, I haven’t seen the movie and probably never will, but unless the title is Barbie, woke equals 100 percent flop rate at the box office.
Many of the critics who pretended to like this mess had the same complaints as those who published negative reviews: 1) it’s an angry feminist diatribe and 2) Gyllenhaal didn’t have a handle on what she wanted the movie to say so she threw a bunch of feminist tropes against the wall and now moviegoers have to sit through watching none of them stick.
Angry feminist diatribe? This woke-Website’s headline implies exactly that: Misogynistic Reactions Can’t Stop Feminist Frankenstein Reinvention The Bride! From Being One of the Boldest Studio Films Ever.
Perhaps Gyllenhaal inadvertently remade the wrong old beloved B-movie, though. Instead of The Bride(!) of Frankenstein, she’s remade the Time Machine instead: The Bride! A Feminist Frankenstein That Plays Like a Lost Remnant of Woke Culture.
Developed in 2023 and early 2024, The Bride! was passed between studios that reportedly disagreed with writer-director Gyllenhaal about budget and creative direction. Looking at the disastrous final product, it’s hard not to come down on the side of executives who had creative disagreements. And no amount of money should have been spent on this mess.
More than anything else, The Bride! feels like the lost remnants of a pre-vibe shift culture, the last vestige of a fully woke world. There are explicit references to riot grrrl culture, and the film’s climax literally involves Ida repeatedly shouting “me too!” at no one in particular.
It would be too easy to describe this as a stitched-together monster of a movie, but at least Frankenstein’s monster had something resembling life.
In any case, the Critical Drinker is succinct: The Bride! It Sucks!