Faced with a difficult movie to market, Warner Bros. Pictures went to the edge of good taste with key copy line “Here Comes the F*%#ing Bride!” The character salad in the text clearly suggests a curse word to promote “The Bride!”
The shock-treatment language (image above is from a “The Bride!” marketing email) did not help. The R-rated horror drama bombed its opening weekend in cinemas, posting a weak $7 million in boxoffice domestically (U.S. and Canada) at 3,304 theaters (a wide release). That ranked a distant third (in comparison, top ranked Disney family film “Hopper” nabbed $45.3 million). The movie didn’t fare much better overseas.
The retelling of the Bride of Frankenstein yarn was directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal and stars Jessie Buckley (favored for the Best Actress Oscar with “Hamnet”).
What went wrong?
The Frankenstein theme is familiar, which means the audience is already acquainted with the famed property and that is good. But there is something like 460 Frankenstein films going back to silents. The new hook is the R-restricted rating with raunchy content in a cineasta-style wrapping.
But that wasn’t sufficient to coax audiences to shell out an average $15 per head for a “Bride” cinema ticket.
Indeed, the attention-getting “F*%#ing” is something of a contradiction. It evokes a crude swear word for a movie trying to be high class.
“Moviegoers might linger on an over-the-top film advertisement, but the usual result is that after they express momentary amazement, they quickly move on,” says the third edition of academic business book “Marketing to Moviegoers.” “What audiences seek are intriguing tales that are well told.”
Avoiding the cinema-ticket hurdle, Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” which received nine Oscar nominations this season, is a stylish upmarket movie built on the same source. But Toro’s version relied on more favorable video streaming economics with Netflix.
For the gothic “The Bride!” set in 1930s Chicago, “period horror is hard as it never fully persuades the horror audience in full, nor sophisticated moviegoers,” writes Anthony D’Alessandro in Deadline.com. “I understand that Gyllenhaal had a slew of ideas for what ‘Bride!’ was — female empowerment movie, ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ tragic love story, punk rock monster movie, all of which testing indicated needed to be stripped back. Exactly who this event was aimed at was also not taken into consideration.”
In 2019, “The Joker” also took a genre-busting approach to a Batman comic-book character with heavy violence, but bombed too after being difficult to market and poor reviews.
Hollywood has long loved the horror genre because its fanboy audience of popular-culture aficionados is dependable and not too demanding in terms of star-power. That means inexpensive films can be hits. But with so many formulaic-horror films releases, the search is on for genre-defying twists to stand out found in “The Bride!” and “Joker.”
Hollywood-major Warners agrees to marketing conforming to industry self-regulating the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), which is based in Los Angeles. CARA preapproves marketing for children/youth protection.
The provocative key copy-line F*%#ing is restricted to media placements where the audience is predominantly suitable for R-rated movies (ages 17 and older). CARA did not comment on “The Bride!”
The arty, edgy film like “The Bride!” is perhaps better suited for independent-sector economics. A major studio, Warners invested about $90 million to make “Bride”; an independent company could produce for one-quarter that negative cost (the production expense) though with less gloss. Even gussying up the production with mainstream talent, “The Bride!” fell between two audience demographics: the smallish, noses-upturned cinephile crowd and the splatter-loving horror crowd. Neither group embraced the film.
Deadline.com says that Warners laid out $65 million in global cinema marketing, and here again an indie distributor would spend less on a comparable movie. Deadline.com says “The Bride!” is on a trajectory to lose $90 million in first-cycle distribution, including downstream TV and video.
“The Bride!” wasn’t an unreasonable risk for Warners. In 2024, upmarket horror “Nosferatu” retelling the Dracula yarn was moderate success with a comparable $21.6 million in domestic boxoffice opening weekend on a lower negative-cost for the film. “Nosferatu” was distributed by Universal’s Focus Features.
“The Bride!” distributor Warners takes occasional risks that have paid off, such as black-cast horror-thriller “Sinners” and Leonardo DiCaprio in off-beat drama “One Battle After Another.” Both generated good boxoffice, good buzz and have an armful of Oscar nominations.
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