Christian Bale’s R-rated sci-fi movie is about to be resurrected on streaming after bombing at the box office.
Having built a career full of extreme transformations, Bale is best known for playing Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000) to his skeletal intensity in The Machinist (2004), and his career-defining run as Bruce Wayne/Batman in The Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), one of the highest-grossing franchises in film history.
Beyond the cape and cowl, Bale played boxer Dicky Eklund in The Fighter (2010) and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and kept stacking Oscar nominations with American Hustle (2013), The Big Short (2015), and Vice (2018). More recently, he’s starred in Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), but now Bale’s new movie is coming to streaming.
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Two months after its theatrical debut, The Bride! is releasing on streaming. Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, inspired by Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the new film follows Christian Bale as “Frank,” a lonely man who travels to 1930s Chicago seeking out a brilliant scientist to build him a companion, who reanimates a murdered young woman – sparking romance, police interest, and radical social change.
The cast also includes recent Oscar winner Jessie Buckley (Hamnet) as The Bride alongside Peter Sarsgaard, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, John Magaro, Matthew Maher, Zlatko Burić, Jeannie Berlin, Julianne Hough, and Louis Cancelmi.
Now, Warner Bros. has announced that The Bride! will make its global streaming debut on HBO Max on Friday, May 22. The movie will also debut on the HBO cable channel the following day, Saturday, May 23, at 8:00 p.m. ET. A version of The Bride! with American Sign Language will also stream exclusively on HBO Max the same day.
The Bride! received mixed reviews, resulting in a 57% Rotten Tomatoes score, with critics claiming that it careens in so many bold and unpredictable directions that it ends up feeling both chaotic and strangely inventive at the same time, built with the caution of a lab experiment gone off the rails.
The Bride! has a slightly better 70% audience score, with many fully embracing its confidence and flair without hesitation, though others are unsure of its cohesion. However, The Bride! bombed at the box office, grossing just $24 million worldwide against its sizable $80–90 million budget (the former reported by Deadline and the latter reported by Variety).
As a result, it’s been reported that The Bride! will lose Warner Bros. about $80–90 million once marketing costs are taken into account. Though The Bride! bombed at the box office, the studio is surely hoping they can stitch it back together and resurrect it for a second life on streaming.
Release Date
March 6, 2026
Runtime
126 Minutes
Director
Maggie Gyllenhaal