It’s alive, but not exactly showing signs of life.
“The Bride!,” director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s punk-rock, feminist reinterpretation of “Bride of Frankenstein,” grossed $7.3 million domestically and $13.6 million worldwide in its opening weekend. This is a terrible result considering Warner Bros. spent $90 million to make the R-rated film, not including the reported $65 million in marketing costs.
“The Bride!” is set in the 1930s. It follows a very lonely Frankenstein’s monster (Christian Bale) and his undead lover (Jesse Buckley) on the run as mad outlaws. Mediocre reviews, horribly poor audience scores, and a mysterious release date caused The Bride! to flop, falling well short of studio expectations of $16 million to $18 million domestically and $40 million worldwide. This ends Warner Bros.’ incredible streak of nine No. 1 hits, including “A Minecraft Movie,” “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “Wuthering Heights.”
Here, Variety dissects five reasons why “The Bride!” It failed to breathe new life into the box office.
unlucky release date
“The Bride!” was originally scheduled to debut on October 3, 2025, which made sense given its proximity to Halloween. There’s a reason horror movies tend to thrive during the spookiest months of the year. So why did Warner Bros. executives (spoiler alert!) move the movie where the Halloween anthem “Monster Mash” plays during the end credits to a random time in early March? Indeed, this calendar placement has been favorable to the studio’s recent highlights, such as “The Batman” and “Dune Part 2.” (It also helped that audiences actually liked those movies.) But The Bride! Nominally, it may have done well in theaters during Season of the Dead.
Too many Frankensteins, too little time
One reason “The Bride!” was delayed to 2026 was to distance itself from Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” in which Jacob Elordi plays a stitched-together monster known as the Creature. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival last August, was released on Netflix in November, and continues to stay in the cultural conversation as an award-winning player. (Frankenstein was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Picture.) Gyllenhaal and del Toro’s films were very different, but their gothic subject matter was too similar to be released just a few months apart. Hollywood, isn’t it time you nailed Mary Shelley’s film adaptation?
The budget has increased significantly
“The Bride!” costs way too much for an R-rated, genre-bending crime story with arthouse ambitions. When Mike De Luca and Pam Abdi began developing the idea as co-chairmen of Warner Bros. Picture Group, they focused on expensive, director-driven swings. That paid off in the Oscar-winning film “Sinners,” which grossed $370 million worldwide against a $90 million budget. And the bulk of the studio’s 2025 slate was dominated by commercial winners like “Minecraft Movie” and “Final Destination 6,” which generated enviable profit margins.
But so far, their other gambles have lost a lot of money. 2024’s Joker: Folie à Deux was rejected for $207 million against a budget of $250 million. The 2025 sci-fi satire “Mickey 17” flopped at $117 million against a $118 million budget. And “One Battle After Another,” another award frontrunner, only grossed $209 million at the box office on a budget of $140 million.
Warner Bros. defended the results of “The Bride!” in a memo to the press Sunday morning. “In an increasingly ‘risk-averse’ business like ours, we believe that studios that take bold initiatives with original work like this film are better for business.” That’s true, and Hollywood shouldn’t stop investing in originality. But there has to be a way to take a chance without betting on the farm.
Press tour that forgot to sell the movie
Apparently, the audience doesn’t want to hear how the monster was sewn together. During the promotional tour, Gyllenhaal had to convince the public to buy tickets and spent much of his time talking about the film’s disastrous preview screening. Meanwhile, her star Buckley was busy on the awards circuit as a frontrunner in the Best Actress Oscar race for “Hamnet.” Then again, there was probably a reason the cast didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
audience rejection
It’s that simple. Reviews were weak. However, moviegoers were completely negative and ignored “The Bride!” “C+” grade in CinemaScore exit poll. When word of mouth is so deadly, no amount of marketing wizardry or compelling stories on late-night talk shows can convince people to get up off their couches. That’s the scary truth.
