The New 'Bridget Jones' Deserved Better than Peacock
The fourth installment is the best since the original. Streaming will reduce its reach.
This weekend saw the release of the fourth installment in two franchises. Both sequels are about a person coping with the burden of a new identity following the loss of a loved one. One of these movies, Captain America: Brave New World, opened on thousands of screens nationwide. The other, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, arrived on Peacock, the 9th biggest streamer (36 million subscribers of December 2024) where it can go no further.
I don’t want to rehash all my arguments against streaming, but while watching the new Bridget Jones, which is easily the best one they’ve made since the 2001 original, I kept wondering about the economics that would send this movie to a streamer rather than a theater. There are three movies in theaters right now that are Valentine’s Day-adjacent: Companion, Heart Eyes, and Love Hurts. Then there is the massive blockbuster of Captain America. But Universal Pictures, the studio behind Mad About the Boy, decided that a straightforwardly romantic movie with a built-in fanbase could not hack it in theaters.
I’m somewhat sympathetic to the economics of theatrical release preventing Bridget Jones from returning to theaters. There’s the cost of prints and advertising, and since the movie cost $50 million to make, it would need to reap at least $40 million domestically to make a theatrical release a worthwhile investment, especially since the loss of DVD revenues. Universal didn’t think they could make that back in the U.S. (it will arrive in theaters internationally where the franchise has always performed well), and off to Peacock it goes.
This Variety article argues that a string of rom-coms flopping theatrically have doomed the genre to streaming. “There was a period in which they couldn’t miss. But then there were a number that were absolutely awful, and streaming changed things. Now you need spectacle to get audiences into theaters.” says Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst. “Now you need spectacle to get audiences into theaters.”
Setting aside the dubious historical argument (rom-coms are like any other genre; they had hits and misses), needing spectacle feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the only movies that are deemed worthy of theatrical release are big, CGI-driven affairs, then that’s all theaters will get. It prevents the audience from even making the choice, and in the case of Mad About the Boy, it shows a studio running scared even when they have the goods.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Mad About the Boy because I think Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is kind of awful and Bridget Jones’ Baby is fine but forgettable. Mad About the Boy feels like the first movie since the first one to do more than make Renée Zellweger mug for the camera and be a hot mess express. Having Bridget deal with the burden of being a widow and single mother, the film trusts that its audience has matured alongside its protagonist and can handle a heavier story that doesn’t lose what made the character endearing.
This is a movie that can’t hack it into today’s marketplace? It has to go straight to streaming while the disappointing Love Hurts is deemed theatrical by costing $18 million and having Ke Huy Quan punch people? 2022’s Downton Abbey: A New Era, another film from Universal (via their Focus Features label) cost $40 million and pulled in $92.7 million at the box office. Is the argument that romantically-driven period pieces can make money, but Bridget Jones is too modern to connect to people?
I do have to fall back on William Goldman’s famous adage, “Nobody knows anything,” but I do feel like both the filmmakers behind Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy and audiences were cheated somewhat by its release strategy. No one is going to subscribe long-term to Peacock for only one movie (if Peacock has any prayer of growing, it’s going to need to rely heavily on sports like football and the Olympics), and now for U.S. audiences, the movie goes nowhere else. Maybe people give Peacock a trial or a one-month subscription to see the movie if they’re big enough fans of Bridget Jones, but it can’t ship out to other streamers or even make money via VOD. Putting a movie on streaming usually means it can’t publicly fail (mainstream moviegoers don’t seem particularly tuned in to streaming numbers, and what counts as “a view” remains fuzzy between streamers), but it also can’t succeed. The desire to avoid a negative report about underperforming opening weekend box office becomes “No news is good news.”
I still maintain that what will drive audiences back to theaters is not solely spectacle, but diversity of product (also, prices need to come down a bit, but major theater chains think they can keep charging $15 a ticket and $9 for popcorn without consequences). A flipside to Captain America: Brave New World scoring a healthy $95 million on its opening weekend is its B- CinemaScore, the worst score a Marvel Studios movie has ever received. Whatever audiences thought they would get from the marketing they did not get from the movie (my theory is they thought they would get more Captain America and instead got way more Red Hulk, hence the poor CinemaScore, which is a metric of how marketing aligns with audience expectations). Spectacle got audiences in theaters this time, but what about the next time? And what about all the times when spectacle isn’t enough to drive box office as we saw last summer with The Fall Guy and Furiosa?
Perhaps I’m wrong and the studio execs have it right that Bridget Jones’ best chance at finding an audience was to land on Peacock (even though if you’re in the U.S. and want to watch the first movie as a refresher, you’ll have to rent it on VOD or watch it on Max because of course). But from my perspective, Universal took a good movie, placed it in a walled garden, and would likely have been better served to set $50 million on fire if they’re not going to fight for the movies they produce.