Warner Bros. Lost a Fortune on The Bride! and Signed Its Director Again Three Months Later

Some numbers first, because almost every figure attached to this film is either an estimate or contested, and it is worth separating them.

What is not in dispute. The Bride! opened on 6 March 2026 in 3,304 theatres and took $7,051,476 domestically — the trades ran the $7.3 million Sunday estimate, which was high. Worldwide opening: $13.6 million. Second weekend: down 70%. Final worldwide gross: $23,944,025. CinemaScore C+. PostTrak "definite recommend": 43%, a number that essentially forecloses word of mouth. Warner Bros. had forecast $16–18 million domestic.

It ended a nine-film streak of number-one domestic openings for the studio.

The budget and the loss are both estimates, and one is built on the other

Warner Bros. has never published a budget. Deadline, the Associated Press and IndieWire all report $80 million; the Hollywood Reporter words it more carefully as a "net budget of $80 million before marketing." Variety reports $90 million, and Box Office Mojo's data field carries that number, which is why it appears in a lot of downstream copy.

The gap is probably not a contradiction — $90 million gross production spend less New York State tax credits gets you to roughly $80 million net — but no outlet says so, so nobody should print it as settled.

A third figure, "over $100 million after $20 million of reshoots," is single-sourced, second-hand, and denied on the record by the reporter closest to the studio: "there was never a $20M reshoot on The Bride! That's misinformation, and Buckley only shot one day of reshoots." The same outlet that published the $100 million figure also headlined an 80% second-weekend drop — it was 70% — and listed an actor in the cast who is not in the film.

Then the famous number. The $90 million loss comes from Deadline, and the sentence it lives in contains three qualifications that get stripped out every time it is reprinted:

"Industry sources, not Warners, believe the loss on The Bride! could approach $90M in its first cycle after home entertainment downstream… Warner Bros declined comment about the movie's P&L."

Anonymous sources, explicitly not the studio. "Could approach." A first-cycle projection including downstream. Variety went no further than "expected to lose tens of millions." Never stack the $90 million loss on the unverified $100 million budget — the estimate was built on the $80 million figure.

Worth adding, for scale: three months later Variety reported Warner Bros.' own Supergirl was bracing for a $100 million loss. By projected loss, The Bride! is not even clearly the biggest failure at its own studio this year.

Netflix passed on the Frankenstein movie, then won three Oscars with a Frankenstein movie

The project began at Netflix in 2023, with Gyllenhaal writing and directing and Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz and Peter Sarsgaard attached. Netflix dropped it on cost. The Wall Street Journal reported that the split "included a disagreement over Gyllenhaal wanting to film in New York while Netflix pushed for New Jersey because it would be cheaper," and that Warner Bros.' Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy "stepped in to foot the bill."

In November 2025, Netflix released Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. It took nine Oscar nominations including Best Picture and won three — Costume Design, Makeup and Hairstyling, Production Design.

Those are precisely the three crafts The Bride! had loaded up on: three-time Oscar winner Sandy Powell on costumes, Oscar-nominated Karen Murphy on production design, and a makeup effects team Fangoria would later nominate. Gyllenhaal lost the crafts race to the film Netflix made instead of hers.

And Deadline supplied the causation: del Toro's film "was watched by 33M in its first week," and tracking indicated potential moviegoers had already had their fill of Frankenstein and would not pay for something they felt they had seen at home. The streamer that refused to fund The Bride! produced the free product that pre-empted its audience.

Nine days apart, its leading lady collected the worst verdict and the highest honour in the business

6 March: The Bride! opens to $7 million, a C+, and 43% definite recommend. Its lead is Jessie Buckley.

15 March: Buckley wins the Best Actress Oscar for Hamnet, the first Irish winner in the category. Warner Bros. takes Best Picture with One Battle After Another.

The detail that finishes it: Deadline reported that The Bride!'s best-grossing theatres were the same theatres where Hamnet was playing well — and that Hamnet, an awards drama, had a running domestic gross of $23.7 million. Which is roughly the entire worldwide gross of the monster movie. Buckley was, in the same fortnight, the most decorated actress in the English-speaking world and not a name that opens a film.

Venice gave her the writing prize. Then the writing was blamed.

Gyllenhaal's debut, The Lost Daughter, cost $5 million, took $703,281 in cinemas, went to Netflix, scored 94% on Rotten Tomatoes and 86 on Metacritic, and drew three Oscar nominations including Adapted Screenplay for Gyllenhaal. It world-premiered at Venice in September 2021, where she won Best Screenplay.

The anonymous industry post-mortem on her second film, on 8 March 2026, was precisely a script problem: "Scripts should be better baked."

Six weeks after that, on 23 April, La Biennale named her President of the Venezia 83 jury. The festival runs 2–12 September; she hands out the Golden Lion on Saturday.

And what she was asked at the jury press conference on 2 September — about only two women directing in a twenty-one-film competition — produced this:

"There's a systemic problem… It's much harder for women to get their films financed… Could it be possible that the things that women, having had a different experience of being alive in the world, want to make movies that are not always deemed high art. Who decides what's good? Who decides what's valuable?"

She had spent the preceding year being answered on both counts, in public, in dollars.

The studio took the loss and immediately bought her the next one

Warner Bros. did not orphan the film. Its distribution president went on the record with the AP in the middle of the worst weekend — "Unfortunately, we came in light" — and then reached for a comparison: "Even the 1927 Yankees had 44 losses that season."

Three months later, on 11 June, Warner Bros. acquired Rachel Kushner's Booker-shortlisted Creation Lake for Gyllenhaal to produce and direct. Variety's own copy registered the oddity: "News of the project might be surprising to some." The studio facing a projected write-down re-signed the director before the film had finished its first month on streaming.

Read against Deadline's closing line on the whole affair — "the biggest mistake would be not betting on Bride!" — that is either the system working as advertised or a studio in the middle of being sold making a bet it may not be around to honour.

The scores, and the cuts

• Rotten Tomatoes: 57% from 336 critics; audience 69%. The critic score moved during release week, from 62% on the Saturday to 59% on the Sunday. Anything quoting 59% is a snapshot.
• Metacritic: 55 from 55 critics — 24 positive, 24 mixed, 7 negative. Users: 4.9.
• Consensus: "Concocted with all the restraint of a mad scientist's experiment, The Bride! lurches in so many different creative directions that the overall effect is both sloppy and inspired."

Gyllenhaal has been candid about what came out. After test screenings held, as she put it, "in malls," Warner Bros. asked her to reduce the violence, including sexual violence. One specific excision, per Variety's rendering of a studio note: Frankenstein licking black vomit off the Bride's neck.

"I had a couple of women say, 'I don't want to see a woman being violated.' And I think, I also don't want to see that. And yet that is a major reality in the culture that we're living in… if we're going to see it, we need to see it in a way that is very hard to watch, because it is very awful. I think we can take it."

On the cuts themselves she was more generous than she needed to be: "I am grateful for the people who were like, 'This is pulling you off,' because in the end, I really do feel the movie is like a laser beam."

One coda. It went to HBO Max on 22 May and was reported within four days as the most-watched film on the service worldwide, number one in the US, Sweden, Spain and Australia. That claim has one source and no named data provider, so treat it as reported rather than established. But the audience score always ran twelve to sixteen points above the critics. What audiences rejected, on this evidence, was the ticket price.