Almost a year ago, on March 19, 2025, Warner Bros. announced a few changes to its upcoming release schedule that would ultimately affect this year’s Oscars. Weapons moved up several months — from Jan. 11, 2026 to Aug. 8, 2025 — shifting the release window closer to awards season and possibly securing Amy Madigan’s well-deserve nomination in the process. That movie took over the slot previous occupied by One Battle After Another, which was pushed to Sept. 28, but a few weeks would never have made an impact on its golden run toward Best Picture front-runner status.
It’s the movie that vacated Sept. 28 for One Battle, however, that may have had an unexpected influence on this year’s Best Actress race. The Bride!, from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, had been set for a September release before moving to this past weekend. At the time, Warner Bros. said the move was about capitalizing on “spring holidays and school breaks” — and not the rumors of post-production drama that haunted the Mary Shelley riff.
But those breaks and holidays didn’t do much for The Bride!. The movie, which is led by Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, opened to a disappointing $13.6 million globally, breaking a recent streak of No. 1 openings for the studio.
While stories about the box-office receipts for The Bride may try to paint it as an out-and-out failure, that is not how either art or business works. The movie does have its own balance sheet, but it is just one title on a slate that has been largely successful as of late. And the critical response is far too mixed to paint such a big creative swing as an indisputable dud. The history of a film is not written in a weekend, but at the moment, it’s safe to say that The Bride! is perceived within the business as a bomb.
And bombs have consequences.
Just as Eddie Murphy. In 2007, he had won both the Golden Globe and the Screen Actors Guild Award for his supporting turn in Dreamgirls. As a major movie star and with the two most significant precursors on his shelf, the Oscar was easily within his grasp. There was just one big obstacle in his way: Norbit. The comedy, set to come out just two weeks before the 79th Academy Awards, received noxious reviews, many of which labeled the film unfunnily offensive and offensively unfunny.
Sixteen days later, Alan Arkin’s win for Best Supporting Actor in Little Miss Sunshine shocked Hollywood (and Murphy especially, as he left after the announcement).
The example has become a case study (dubbed the Norbit Effect) for how a poorly received film released after a nominated movie but before the Oscars can scuttle a nominees chances. The Bride may be nowhere near Norbit’s level of radioactivity, but the shift in its release date until after Academy voting for Buckley’s dominant Hamnet role had closed kept the film’s financial struggles from affecting the balloting at all.