The Bride!, Warner Brothers’ angry, male-hating, violent, heavy-handed woke movie bombed in its opening weekend, trounced by a family-friendly film – and even by the sixth sequel of a horror-movie satire.
The feminist vision of the bride of Frankenstein took in a measly $7,260,000 in its first weekend, despite being shown in 3,304 theaters across the U.S., averaging $2,197 gross per theater. The film had been projected to take in $16-18 million domestically.
Meanwhile, Disney/Pixar’s animated Hoppers took in $46,000,000 ($11,500 per theater) – or about six times the box office sales of The Bride!
And, the second weekend of Scream 7, the sixth sequel of the comedic slasher satire franchise, more than doubled The Bride!’s opening weekend performance with box office receipts of $17,300,000, an average of $4,887 per theater.
The Bride! bombed at the box office, even though it “had everything going for it”:
- Christian Bale and Jessie Buckley in starring roles.
- A massive $90 million budget.
- $65 million of promotion.
- A wide release in theaters.
- A popular genre.
But, none of that could overcome what The Bride! doesn’t have – audience appeal – as Variety explains:
“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.”
“‘The Bride!’ is steeped in woke storytelling, but nobody told writer/director Maggie Gyleenhaal that clunky messaging drives people away from theaters,” Christian Toto, host of The Hollywood in Toto podcast, tells CNSNews:
“The film is visually striking, but heavy-handed lectures are the antithesis of entertainment. We’re seeing that in the tepid box office results.”
“No one factor contributes exclusively to a film’s dismal box office performance. Some early reviews skewered the film in ways that may have made it toxic for on-the-fence audiences. And even IndieWire.com, an aggressively left-leaning film site, used the term ‘woke’ in its dismissive review.”
“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,” according to Variety’s recap.
“It’s a garishly beautiful lecture, but the film’s core themes are redundant and dull. Men bad. Women good … and oppressed … and angry. Sorry. They’re angry!” a review by Hollywood in Toto explains:
“The story’s anachronisms are maddening and inconsistent, and they’re all about pushing an agenda. The phrase ‘Me too’ is literally shouted in case you missed the film’s true north.”
A major theme is that that the woman reanimated to be Frankenstein’s bride didn’t give her “consent” to be brought back to life, the film’s director told Deadline:
“Through her reimagined take on the iconic Frankenstein bride character, Maggie Gyllenhaal says the upcoming horror/sci-fi crime flick The Bride! cannot skirt past the issue of consent as a central thesis in the film.
“‘In the mythology of the Bride of Frankenstein, that’s the major issue,’ she told Deadline at the London-held world premiere of the movie. ‘I can’t make a movie about the bride of Frankenstein without consent being really on the table because she fundamentally has no say in it.’”
“I actually think that when I really became a director was the morning that Trump was first elected.” Gyllenhaal told The New York Times, signaling the leftist political motivation behind her work . “I was like, I have a lot more to say than I’ve been saying.”
Breitbart describes The Bride! as “an angry feminist diatribe,” in which the director “threw a bunch of feminist tropes against the wall” hoping that some would stick. “The news that The Bride! is a super-woke spin on The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) has been obvious for some time and became blatantly obvious when the reviews poured in.”
“Ida (the bride) and Frank (Frankenstein) begin traveling the country, exploring feminist concepts while occasionally killing people,” Reason writes:
“As Ida (the bride) and Frank (Frankenstein) continue their Bonnie and Clyde-like crime spree, they spark a national feminist revolution, in which women begin rebelling against the patriarchy in various nonsensical ways, mostly by shouting things in the streets.
“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.”
Indeed, the film portrays males as sadistic, abusive, misogynistic rapists. The film’s violence is necessary to portray her view of reality, Gyllenhaal told Entertainment Weekly:
“I have to say, I felt strongly that the sexual violence had to be brutal, real, because if you gloss over it, it doesn’t feel like the brutality that it is.”
“And therein lies the problem with the modern entertainment industry,” Outkick comments on Gyleenhaal’s worldview in an article describing The Bride! as the “latest gigantic Hollywood box office disaster”:
“Nobody knows what they’re doing creatively. And the executive and development ranks are infested with hard-left ideologues who live in a bubble of progressive absurdity. Instead of prioritizing quality, originality, humor, and talent, they’ve chosen political conformity. The most generic, boring, divisive, cringe view anyone’s ever seen, with tens of millions of dollars wasted on films that have no chance of success.”
