Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Ultra-Woke Frankenstein Flick ‘The Bride!’ Bombs at Box Office
Before we begin, I would like to point out to the useless sycophants of the entertainment media that what I am doing here is how is it done.
You see, the news that The Bride! is a super woke version of Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was obvious for a while and became glaring when reviews poured in – especially “positive” reviews, because even “positive” reviews were “positive” in a reluctant, roundabout way.
So yes, I wanted The bride! fail at the box office, because woke delivers lousy art and even worse storytelling, and the only way to stop it is to fail at the box office.
But, useless courtiers of the entertainment media, have you seen what we haven’t done? What we didn’t do was what you useless courtiers did with Melanie. We didn’t make wishes by writing piece after piece about how Bride! would die at the box office. For what? 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 – that’s what you useless courtiers did Melaniesomething that all normal people thank you for.
SO, The bride!…
Writer and director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! cost about $100 million to produce and at least another $60 million to $80 million to promote, and it’s poised to become an iconic box office bomb with an opening weekend in the $7 million to $10 million range.
The Bride! there was everything for that. A big star in Christian Bale, the hottest actress in Jessie Buckley (who is about to win the Academy Award for Best Actress), a huge budget, lots of promotion, a wide release in over 3,300 theaters, an appealing genre, and a 61 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes thanks to critics who didn’t really like the movie but found a way to pretend to like it to prove their loyalty to the Woke Gestapo.
So what went wrong…?
Well, I haven’t seen the movie and I probably never will, but unless the title is Barbie, Woke equates to a 100 percent failure rate at the box office.
Many of the critics who claimed to love this mess had the same complaints as those who posted negative reviews: 1) it’s an angry feminist rant and 2) Gyllenhaal didn’t have a clue what she wanted the movie to say, so she threw a bunch of feminist tropes at the wall and now moviegoers have to sit back and watch none of them stick.
Here’s the best example of Gyllenhaal just not getting it that I’ve come across. As you’ll see below, she was wrong from the start. The germ of his idea was based on a ridiculously misinterpretation of the material that inspired it:
When Maggie Gyllenhaal sat down to rewatch Bride of FrankensteinJames Whale’s 1935 classic, she was unprepared for what she hadn’t seen. The Bride appears for only two minutes. She doesn’t say anything. She looks at the creature she was built for, screams once, and explodes. She was made for a man who disgusted her, in a world that didn’t give her a say. And then she left.
“She finds herself in such an insane situation,” Gyllenhaal said at a press conference promoting the film. “Having been brought back from the dead without her consent to become the wife of someone she never met.” This absence – a character evoked, everything denied and eliminated – fueled The bride!, his new film with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale.
But as Jeff Wells rightly points out, Gyllenhaal completely misinterpreted the 1935 classic:
Gyllenhaal [is] imagine things. Boris Karloff’s monster doesn’t want Lanchester to become his wife or satisfy him sexually…at all. He is simply looking for gentle friendship – the same kind of humanitarian attention the old man of the forest offered him… a warm fire, soup, wine, bread, a cigar. Karloff doesn’t scratch, pet, or even pet Lanchester. He’s definitely not trying to use or dominate her sexually. He just holds her hand and moans “friend?…friend?”
As the (correct) saying goes, interpretation says more about the performer than the material performedand what you have here in Gyllenhaal is a feminist hammer, treating everything as a nail.
I would add that Karloff’s monster was also brought back to life “without consent.”
A number of critics complain that The Bride! arriving half a decade too late, the Woke/#MeToo era is over. This is a 2017 film, not a 2026 film, they say.
Yes, well let me point out that (apart from barbie), the failure rate of woke/#MeToo films was still 100% during the peak of the Woke/#MeToo era.
