Before we get started, I’d like to point out to the useless sycophants in the entertainment media that what I’m doing here is how it’s done.
You see, 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 — especially the “positive” reviews, because even the “positive” reviews were “positive” in a grudging and backhanded sort of way.
So, yes, I wanted The Bride! to fail at the box office, because woke delivers lousy art and even worse storytelling, and the only way to make it stop is for it to fail at the box office.
But, 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.
Here’s the best example of Gyllenhaal simply not getting it I’ve come across. As you’ll see below, she was misguided from the start. The seed of her idea was based on a laughably wrong interpretation of the material that inspired her:
When Maggie Gyllenhaal sat down to rewatch The Bride of Frankenstein, the 1935 James Whale classic, she wasn’t prepared for what she didn’t see. The Bride appears for only two minutes. She says nothing. She looks at the creature she was built to love, screams once and is blown up. She was made for a man who disgusted her, in a world that gave her no say in the matter. And then she was gone.
“She finds herself in such an insane situation,” Gyllenhaal said in a press conference promoting the film. “Having been brought back from the dead without her consent to be the wife of someone that she’s never met.” That absence — a character conjured into existence, denied everything and eliminated — fueled The Bride!, her new film starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
But as Jeff Wells accurately points out, Gyllenhaal totally misread the 1935 classic:
Gyllenhaal [is] imagining things. Boris Karloff‘s monster doesn’t want Lanchester to become his bride or satisfy him sexually… not at all. He’s simply looking for gentle friendship — the same kind of humanitarian caring that the old man in the forest offered him… a warm fire, soup, wine, bread, a cigar. Karloff doesn’t paw or stroke or even caress Lanchester. He certainly doesn’t try to use or dominate her sexually. He simply holds her hand and whimpers “friend?…friend?”
As the (correct) saying goes, the interpretation says more about the interpreter than the material being interpreted, and what you have here in Gyllenhaal is a feminist hammer, seeing everything as a nail.
I would add that Karloff’s monster was also brought back to life “without consent.”
A number of critics are complaining that the The Bride! arrived half a decade too late, the Woke/#MeToo Era has passed. This is a 2017 movie, not a 2026 movie, they say.
Yes, well, allow me to point out that (other than Barbie), the flop-rate for woke/#MeToo movies was still 100 percent during the peak Woke/#MeToo Era.