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It was a complete rejection by moviegoers around the world this weekend as Maggie Gyllenhaal’s $80M bride of Frankenstein monster movie, The Bride!, opened to $13.6M.
Of that, domestic was $7.3M, not only breaking Warner Bros’ No. 1 nine-picture opening streak at the B.O., but repping a bow that was lower than some recent lows for the Burbank, CA lot, read last year’s disasters Mickey 17 ($19M) and Companion ($9.3M).
Industry sources, not Warners, believe the loss on The Bride! could approach $90M in its first cycle after home entertainment downstream. Note, it will be a while before the ultimate red is realized. Warner Bros had no comment about the movie’s P&L which includes $65M in worldwide P&A. Bad timing for a loss as WBD CEO David Zaslav just cashed in $114M+ in stocks due to a trading window opening for executives involved in any deal negotiations.
Word was out for quite some time that The Bride! was doomed, that Gyllenhaal was having an uphill battle during production, this her first massive big-budget movie after the $5M costing (before P&A), 3x Oscar nominated Lost Daughter. Hence the push of the pic’s release date from last fall to this weekend.
You can’t fault Warners on the weekend, it’s right in the pre-Oscars slot and there’s a lot of heat for Bride! star Jessie Buckley to take home Best Actress next Sunday for Hamnet after wins at the Actors Awards, BAFTA, Golden Globes and Critics Choice. However, many around town consider the production cost for an original, edgy, high-art movie, with an actress who is still nascent in her career as far as marquee value goes, to be way too much. It’s an understatement to say that we live in a world where a movie’s bad word of mouth is immediate in the social media-verse (take your pick, Solo: Star Wars Story, Snow White, the list goes on); it’s very hard for marketing to save a movie alone. And when it’s great, a la other Warner Bros’ big bets, Sinners and One Battle After Another, the movie is screened well in advance to trigger good vibes.
What is clear in watching in Gyllenhaal’s Bride! is that every shot is ornate and deliberate, the point was to be campy, badass, with the filmmaker notching sublime performances out of her actors with Bale and Buckley losing themselves entirely onscreen. I understand Gyllenhaal got to make the movie she wanted with the full support of Warner Bros Motion Picture chairs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca. Bale, Buckley and Gyllenhaal worked it over the last two weeks on a London and NYC press tour. No orphaning going on here by anyone.
Then where does The Bride! miss? And how does a period horror movie like Nosferatu sans major stars rally with a $21.6M opening, and a $95.6M domestic, $181.9M final? We’ve said it too many times: Period horror is hard as it never fully persuades the horror audience in full, nor sophisticated moviegoers. Bride!‘s C+ Cinemascore is on par with Midsommar‘s C+, and just below the B- grades of Nosferatu, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola-produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
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Nosferatu worked in that it knew it was an elevated horror film; not to mention Dracula has more bite at the box office than Frankenstein in recent adaptations. Nosferatu also cost a reported $50M off $75M P&A and netted a $70M profit. While Bride! is aesthetically appealing, there’s a small audience for such fare. I understand that Gyllenhaal had a slew of ideas for what Bride! was — female empowerment movie, Bonnie & Clyde tragic love story, punk rock monster movie, all of which testing indicated needed to be stripped back. Exactly who this event was aimed at was also not taken into consideration. Screen Engine/Comscore’s Post Trak exits showed a 53% male/47% female split with 39% guys over 25, 27% women over 25. Definite recommend, which is a platinum indicator of legs and word-of-mouth, was very low at 43%. The picture seemed to lean more toward the sophisticated audiences (we hear that the movie’s best grosses where in Hamnet houses). Some critics found the zaniness of Bale’s ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ number (an homage to Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein) hysterically brilliant, while others didn’t get the joke. Gyllenhaal, I’m told, embraced the testing process (she didn’t have that on Lost Daughter) and reportedly soaked up all the comments. However, choices were made, and the pic’s pacing remained meandering, along with extra characters who didn’t drive the plot forward (Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard as the detective alongside Penélope Cruz). The ultimate fail here was the DNA of the movie and its inability to be an event for anybody.
Also leaving Bride! more bruised was its arrival post Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Though a Netflix streaming movie, the 9x Oscar-nominated movie was watched by 33M in its first week. Greenlight Analytics tracking indicated that potential moviegoers already got their fill on anything Frankenstein, and hence weren’t going out of their way to spend money on a movie they felt they already watched at home.
A few things to consider in regards to The Bride!‘s exorbitant production cost. Gyllenhaal received top shelf with her cast, as well as below the line talent in Oscar-nominated Elvis production designer Karen Murphy, Joker’s Oscar-nominated DP Lawrence Sher, and 3x Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell. The movie was shot in New York, and even though it received tax credits, I’m told that creative decision alone is what made the project too expensive for Netflix. In the same breath, the movie was shot in the United States. Isn’t that what the motion picture industry wants? If that’s the case, then there’s a very good case for money spent. There were $60M in production wages on The Bride! with over 2,500 local hires. The production worked with 500 businesses. Amen.
At the same time, the domestic box office is fragile, and the industry needs movies like Bride! to win. Lower production cost should be married to originality, and may the two never be separated. I understand that there was never a $20M reshoot on The Bride! That’s misinformation, and Buckley only shot one day of reshoots. De Luca and Abdy’s plan is to have a diversified slate so that the potential hits pay for any shortfalls for the big swings. And there’s plenty of heat on this year’s schedule with the Zazie Beetz SXSW world premiere They Will Kill, Mortal Kombat II, DC’s Supergirl, Evil Dead Burn, David Robert Mitchell’s Flowervale Street, Practical Magic 2, Alejandro Inarritu’s Tom Cruise movie Digger, Clayface, The Cat in the Hat, J.J. Abrams’ The Great Beyond and Legendary’s Dune: Part Three on the horizon before Paramount swallows up what they see as a prized franchise studio, one that earned more than $4B at the global box office last year; one that was worth wrestling over with Netflix.
In what alternative universe does The Bride! win? At a significantly lower price point for an original, far away from del Toro’s Frankenstein, with a film festival launch. At the same time, the biggest mistake would be not betting on Bride!