Billboard Women in Music 2025
The $100 million feature take The Bride from Maggie Gyllenhaal showed off its first footage at CinemaCon on Tuesday, with the filmmaker and star Jessie Buckley in attendance.
Logline: In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein asks Dr. Euphronius to help create a companion. They give life to a murdered woman as The Bride, sparking romance, police interest and radical social change.
A small taste of the steampunk horror-tinged film showed Buckley’s Bride taking a fatal fall that “wasn’t any accident.” On a lab table with metal cables coming out of her body she comes back to life, then meets Christian Bale’s monster who intones, “Til death do us part.”
Buckley said Gyllenhaal’s script had “an electrical language that I’d never read or seen cinematically.” She called the relationship between the monster and The Bride “the punkest love that’s ever existed. It’s like Bonnie and Clyde and Wild at Heart… I think our one has some petrol in its skin and we’re holding a match beside it.”
Gyllenhaal explained that after making The Last Daughter, she was looking for “something pop and big and I wanted it to be radical at the same time. I was at this party and saw this guy with the Bride of Frankenstein tattooed on his arm… It hooked me… In the original, the bride is in the movie for about three minutes and doesn’t speak which could not be more different than ours… I’m really interested in monsters and I think that all of us have a little aspect of something monstrous in us. Monsters in our movie do monstrous things, but they’re also our heroes.”
The Bride was originally dated to come out September 26 before stomping its way to March 6, 2026. Warners rescued the movie from Netflix, which is where The Bride was originally set up. The streamer passed on Gyllenhaal’s wish to shoot the movie in New York, but Warners obliged. Ultimately, Gyllenhaal shot the movie on Imax and said today she was “a total convert.”
Alongside Buckley and Bale, Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening and Penélope Cruz also star in a script from Gyllenhaal. Producers are Emma Tillinger Koskoff, Talia Kleinhendler, Osnat Handelsman-Kere and Gyllenhaal.