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Over the Valentine’s Day weekend of 2025, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was released. The fourth entry in the popular Bridget Jones film franchise, which began in 2001 with the critically acclaimed Bridget Jones’s Diary, landed in theaters worldwide on Feb. 13, 2025… except in the United States. If you lived in North America and wanted to see Bridget Jones’s latest adventure, you couldn’t see it on the big screen. Instead, the movie was released exclusively on the Universal streaming service Peacock. There is a good chance you might not have known there was a new Bridget Jones film, as the movie was seemingly dumped onto streaming with little fanfare.
While the idea of releasing Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy over Valentine’s Day weekend on streaming, so fans could watch it under some covers at home with a bottle of wine and some high-quality snacks, sounds like a good idea in theory, in actuality, it was a big mistake. Mad About the Boy delivered a record-breaking debut at the U.K. and Ireland box office, grossing $15.5 million over the first four days, marking the highest-grossing romantic comedy debut ever in the region previously held by none other than Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy easily beat Captain America: Brave New World at the U.K. box office and stands at an impressive $32 million worldwide total.
While Captain America: Brave New World was always going to dominate the North American box office over the Valentine’s Day/President’s Day weekend, Universal’s decision not to release Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy in theaters speaks to a larger frustrating trend. Studios have no faith in romance films to perform in theaters and send them straight to streaming. Yet recent box office suggests audiences are dying to see love stories on the big screen.
What Was Universal Pictures Thinking With ‘Bridget Jones’?
Part of the thinking behind sending Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy stems from the box office performance of the two prior sequels, 2004’s Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and 2016’s Bridget Jones’ Baby. 2001’s Bridget Jones Diary was a box office hit, grossing $71 million domestically and $334 million worldwide against a $10 million budget. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason grossed $40 million domestically, which was its production budget, but even the $265 million worldwide total showed a decline among audiences. Bridget Jones’s Baby flopped in North America, grossing $24 million against a $35 million budget. However, international markets saved it, where it grossed $211 million worldwide, although there was a continued downward trend in the franchise box office. Bridget Jones has always been a better box office performer in international markets than North America.
However, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy had a few box office elements working in its favor. The first was Renée Zellweger, who earned her second Academy Award for Best Actress since the release of the previous Bridget Jones movie, something that a savvy marketing department might have pushed. The film is directed by Michael Morris, who previously directed the acclaimed To Leslie. Hugh Grant returns to the franchise and has been on a career comeback thanks to films like Paddington 2, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Wonka, and Heretic.
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Another factor working in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’s favor was that the prime Valentine’s Day release date also happened to align with a four-day holiday weekend. The Bridget Jones series has never had a particular season associated with its releases, as both Bridget Jones Diary and Bridget Jones Baby opened in relatively slower box office months of April and September, respectively. With Bridget Jones being a romantic franchise, Valentine’s Day weekend was the perfect time to release it. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy would have made the movie good date night counter-programming for Captain America: Brave New World, but also likely could have cashed in on the Galentine’s Day celebrations.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy likely wasn’t going to compete with Captain America: Brave New World for audiences, but instead, attract a different audience member out to theaters that weekend and could have seen an overall boost in theater attendees. Despite all the hype around Barbienheimer and various studios seemingly trying to chase that trend, the obvious pairing of action-heavy Captain America: Brave New World with romance Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy seemed to be lost on Universal. It is absurd to think that Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy couldn’t have generated a decent box office haul over the weekend and could have taken the number 2 spot from Paddington in Peru.
Romance Movies Keep Getting Sent to Streaming
At one point, rom-coms used to be one of the most reliable box office money makers, with 1999’s Notting Hill and Runaway Bride both grossing over $100 million at the domestic box office. By the 2010s, however, the genre was falling out of favor with general audiences. By the time Bridget Jones Baby bombed at the North American box office in 2016, the genre was migrating to streaming platforms as they began experimenting with their own original films. Despite Crazy Rich Asians lighting up the box office in 2018, that same year, Netflix released Set it Up, To All the Boys I Loved Before, and The Kissing Booth straight to streaming. Once, these films would have been solid hits in theaters, but now, they are movies audiences could watch at home, feeding into a narrative that this type of movie didn’t warrant a movie theater, which should be saved for big epic blockbusters.
The COVID-19 pandemic sped this process up, as the idea was that romantic dramas and comedies were cheap to produce and could be released quickly onto streaming platforms. While this might have been necessary in 2020, romance movies like Palm Springs, Happiest Season, and The Half of It were much-needed viewing experiences in a year without theaters. Yet, five years later, romance movies featuring big stars are still sent straight to streaming unceremoniously in a move that no other genre would.
Movies like Anne Hathaway’s The Idea of You, Camila Mendes’ Upgraded and Música, David Johnson’s Rye Lane, Lili Reinhart’s Look Both Ways, or I Want You Back, which features stars like Charlie Day, Jenny Slate, Scott Eastwood, Gina Rodriguez, Manny Jacinto, and Clark Backo all likely might have done decent numbers at the box office if they had been given a chance. Yet a vicious cycle has unfolded, where studios don’t release romances in theaters anymore because they don’t think the audience will see them, but they don’t give them a chance.
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And the few times studios have rolled the dice on a romance, both high concept or just a standard romantic-comedy, audiences have gone to see them, likely stemming from a nostalgia for the genre. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum’s The Lost City, a throwback to adventure comedies like Romancing the Stone, grossed $192 million worldwide. George Clooney and Julia Robert’s Ticket to Paradise sold a vacation romance with two reliable stars, and it grossed $168 million worldwide. One of the big surprise box office success stories in recent years was Sydney Sweeny and Glen Powell’s Anyone but You, which grossed $220 million worldwide off a $6 million budget. Clearly, there is an appetite for romance movies in theaters. Yet despite Glen Powell’s star power, Netflix acquired the steamy romance Hit Man and dropped it on streaming to where it was sadly overlooked.
Despite the box office pointing to an audience wanting more romance on film, Universal Pictures decided to send the latest film in a popular romance franchise to streaming, likely leaving millions of dollars on the table. Even though Universal Pictures decided to bump this film down to a streaming debut, it doesn’t make it any less worthy. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is a very different film for the franchise, one that is less romantic and more bittersweet, but it is just as good as Bridget Jones Baby and could be the second-best film in the franchise behind the iconic first film. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is streaming on Peacock.
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