Because the Oscars loom, cinemas are bracing themselves for a selected surge of curiosity in a single hotly anticipated title. Bridget Jones: Mad Concerning the Boy, the fourth instalment within the misadventures of Helen Fielding’s hapless romantic, could also be unlikely to dominate the Academy Awards, however it’s set to wash up at screens throughout the nation over the Valentine’s Day interval – and past.
“We’re anticipating it to be one of many largest titles of the yr within the UK, the most important British movie of the yr, and the most important field workplace for the primary half of 2025,” says Robert Mitchell, director of theatrical insights at Gower Road Analytics.
“Pre-sales are even increased than for blockbusters like Barbie,” mentioned Eduardo Leal, group Regional director of display content material for the Vue cinema chain. “It’s monitoring to be the most important ever Bridget Jones movie.”
9 years after Renée Zellweger’s bumbling reporter fell pregnant in Bridget Jones’s Child, she is now again with two kids however no husband, as human rights lawyer Mark Darcy has been killed off throughout a heroic humanitarian journey to Sudan. Colin Firth does, nevertheless, make quite a lot of spectral – but nonetheless dishy – appearances within the new movie, that are closely teased within the trailer.
Resurrected as an alternative is dastardly smoothie Daniel Cleaver, who was lacking presumed lifeless in Child, however is now again in motion, with dialogue polished by Hugh Grant himself.
The movie is being positioned as a tonic to different, tougher, awards contenders such because the post-Holocaust epic The Brutalist and September 5, primarily based onthe terrorist assault on the 1972 Munich Olympics. The newest Bridget Jones instalment additionally presents a female-skewed various to extra mainstream new releases, together with Captain America: Courageous New World, Marvel’s new superhero providing starring Harrison Ford and Anthony Mackie.
“I may also say that we’re anticipating a bumper Valentine’s weekend with an ideal mixture of titles for all audiences,” says Mitchell. “I feel Bridget is completely positioned counter-programming to Captain America.”
Nevertheless, this pleased marriage of product and timing is unique to the UK, as a result of within the US the movie is skipping cinemas and going straight to streaming. Such disparity of expectation between the 2 territories is sort of unprecedented. Normally, the explanations for radically completely different launch methods are attributable to the cultural divide; Dennis Quaid’s middle-of-the-road Reagan biopic cleaned up within the southern US final yr however did not safe a launch within the UK.
Some genres, resembling religion movies and far of the work of US actor Tyler Perry, equally wrestle to realize sufficient transatlantic traction for UK distributors to threat greater than a distinct segment digital launch. In the meantime, the experimental Robbie Williams biopic Higher Man, during which the singer is reimagined as CGI chimp, left American audiences baffled, and within the US it earned only a quarter of the $8m (£6.4m) it made on dwelling turf.
However the Bridget Jones movies have been opening to diminishing returns within the US for the reason that begin. The primary movie made a good 25% of its $282m world take within the US in 2001; by the second, in 2004, that had dropped to fifteen% (of a $265m whole). In 2016, Bridget Jones’s Child had an much more troubled transatlantic beginning, with simply 11% of its last takings coming from the US. That $20m (of $211m) was, nevertheless, trebled within the UK, the place the movie broke a substantial variety of data and was the third best-performing film of the yr.
For Mad Concerning the Boy the distributor Common Footage and manufacturing firm Working Title struck a deal for US rights with the streamer Peacock earlier than the movie went into manufacturing, however some at the moment are questioning whether or not such scepticism about its American prospects could have been misguided.
Early phrase of mouth on the movie, whose opinions are embargoed till 12 February, has been constructive, with many praising the reinvention and stamina of the franchise, regardless of the central love triangle having two new corners: Chiwetel Ejiofor (who performs a strict but ripped science trainer) and Leo Woodall (a strapping parks supervisor).
The movie’s central stress – the on-off affair between the characters performed by Zellweger, who’s 55 and Woodall, who’s 28 – may be very on level, with age-gap relationships involving older girls and youthful males producing two field workplace hits previously yr, due to Anne Hathaway and Nicole Kidman (twice).
Many – together with Grant – have additionally flagged Mad Concerning the Boy’s elegant Kleenex credentials, with the theme of grief (which is central to Fielding’s 2013 novel on which this instalment is predicated) faithfully transferred to the display by the movie’s co-writer Abi Morgan. Tonally, the movie is reportedly significantly extra mature and thematically advanced than its predecessors, and its visible palette additionally extra formidable – thanks, maybe, to incoming director Michael Morris, whose most up-to-date movie was the acclaimed drama To Leslie, about an alcoholic single mom in Texas.
Two years in the past, that movie earned its star Andrea Riseborough a really stunning Oscar nomination. So don’t write Bridget off simply but.
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