Media Plays Defense for Woke ‘Bride!’ Bust
Variety, Deadline can't share key reason for film's disastrous debut
This might be one of the dumbest lines written this year in a mainstream Hollywood rag.
Deadline explained that celebrated director Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” starring perennial awards season darling Leonardo DiCaprio as an anti-ICE terrorist, faced a rough road to Oscar night.
And this scribe wasn’t alone in mocking that take.
*NO ONE EXPECTED AN ANTI-ICE PTA FILM TO BE AN AWARDS JUGGERNAUT*
Holy shit @DEADLINE congrats on the stupidest thing ever written by a Hollywood trade pic.twitter.com/txHPAdsGQV
— Erick Weber (@ErickWeber) March 8, 2026
Was A.I. to blame? At least, that would be an excuse, of sorts.
No, too often “narrative” overrules logic on Legacy Media web sites. It’s why The New York Times said Rama Duwaji simply supported the Palestinian cause on social media, ignoring how she “liked” a post claiming the Oct. 7 rapes were fake.
This is how the New York Times described posts championing the mass murder of Jews on October 7th that Mamdani’s wife liked https://t.co/GiGoPPEdIN pic.twitter.com/73iO8ZKB0m
— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) March 7, 2026
It’s why major entertainment outlets can’t call out “The Bride!” for bringing woke back to theaters nationwide. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s monster mashup bombed at the box office over the weekend, earning roughly $7 million stateside on a budget that’s reportedly between $80 – $100 million.
Now, many factors come into play when a film underperforms. The trailer left people cold. The stars in question couldn’t guarantee fannies in seats. The competition proved too intimidating.
“The Bride!” offered one more reason for failure. The film’s woke lecturing left the audiences who actually watched the film cold. Others sensed the film’s overt messaging and steered clear.
Both explain the bad word of mouth buzz and sorry CinemaScore – C+. Gyllenhaal’s feminist agenda swamped the storytelling on more than a few occasions.
The film’s anti-heroine even screeches “me too!” at one point. Yikes.
The woke excesses played a role, no doubt, in the middling reviews and sour work of mouth. Even the far-Left IndieWire mentioned the dreaded “W” word in its review headline.
So did Variety mention the film’s nagging nature against men as part of its box office fizzle? IndieWire? Deadline?
No. No. No.
Variety blamed a tepid press tour, Frankenstein fatigue (Guillermo Del Toro’s version of the movie monster proved a smash for Netflix) and an “inauspicious release date.”
Huh?
IndieWire’s tap-dancing around an inconvenient truth took true imagination.
You can chalk up the lack of interest in “The Bride!” to some “Frankenstein” fatigue after Guillermo del Toro’s Best Picture nominee and “Poor Things” not long before that. The film was also delayed a bit, which may have been a silver lining to get it out of 2025 as Warner Bros.’ parent company was trying to negotiate a sale. And while “The Bride!” might not even be classified as a horror movie, there were other options for horror fans still in theaters with “Scream 7” and “Send Help.” There’s more than a few reasons why this one didn’t work.
Deadline’s spin cycle proved equally silly.
We’ve said it too many times: Period horror is hard as it never fully persuades either horror audiences or 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.
The scribe took the wayback machine for some of those comparables. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” hit theaters in 1994.
They could have collectively said, “get woke, go broke,” but reports don’t dare say that aloud.