This is a very bad sign.
Last month, I posted about how Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” kept receiving bad test scores. Puck’s Matt Belloni heard the same, and wondered how in the hell did Gyllenhaal, who only directed one film prior to this one, manage to convince Warner Bros to finance her $100M musical.
Further bad omens arrived today for the film, this time in the form of a date change. “The Bride!,” which was supposed to come out in late September, and has now been delayed to March 6, 2026.
What this date change tells me is that Warner Bros has basically given up on “The Bride!.” There’s no other way to say it. Don’t be surprised if there are reshoots. Warner Bros now has 11 months to come up with something watchable.
The behind the scenes drama on “The Bride!” has become so dire that Warners’ Pamela Abdy was recently tasked with “getting the film into shape” for its originally planned release in the fall, and word was that she was having a hard time with it.
“The Bride!” has a stacked cast: Peter Sarsgaard, Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, John Mulaney and Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s said to be a loose remake of 1935’s “Bride of Frankenstein” — the sequel to 1931’s “Frankenstein.”
Gyllenhaal previously helmed the Netflix-backed 2021 psychological drama, “The Lost Daughter,” starring Olivia Colman, which turned out to be a critical hit. It garnered three Oscar nominations and won Gyllenhaal Best Screenplay honors at Venice.
Overall, the Main Slate selection will have tons of Cannes stalwarts, with films from Hamaguchi, Almodóvar, Grisebach, Marre, Wollner, Pawlikowski, Sachs, Zvyagintsev, and Harari.