Maggie Gyllenhaal's long-awaited sophomore directorial effort, a reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, earned just $7.3 million domestically over its opening weekend, placing third at the box office. Globally, the film brought in $13.6 million combined against an $80 million production budget, before marketing costs of roughly $65 million are factored in. Industry observers now estimate the film could lose somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 million before its streaming run.
The picture earned a C+ CinemaScore from audiences, which is the industry's equivalent of 'meh.' A low 43% 'definite recommend' rating from PostTrak exit polling made word-of-mouth tough to rely on. Reviews were mixed with the film holding a 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics split between admiring Gyllenhaal's vision and finding the execution frustrating.
So what went wrong? Several things converged at once. The movie was asking audiences to pay for an R-rated Gothic period horror-romance that critics themselves couldn't clearly define. Was it a punk rock monster movie? A feminist empowerment thriller? A Bonnie-and-Clyde love story? Testing apparently flagged this identity problem early, but the film went forward. And while both Buckley and Bale are genuinely praised in their performances (Buckley is currently the Oscar frontrunner for Best Actress for the entirely different film Hamnet), that buzz may have actually worked against The Bride!, since audiences who wanted to see Buckley could wait for her in a different, more celebrated film arriving on streaming any day.
For Gyllenhaal, the sting may be real but she's not alone. Directors from Paul Thomas Anderson to Cate Blanchett have had singular visions fail commercially without it derailing their careers. And The Bride!'s opening doesn't erase the fact that the film features some of the most ornate, visually deliberate filmmaking of Gyllenhaal's career, and Buckley delivers a genuinely enjoyable performance.
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