The Bride!: Everything We Know About Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Bride of Frankenstein remake

We have put together a list of everything we know about The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s take on The Bride of Frankenstein

Nobody was expecting it, but it’s true: two-time Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal – who earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her performance in the 2010 film Crazy Heart and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for writing her 2021 feature directorial debut The Lost Daughter – is writing and directing a film called The Bride!, a new take on the concept of the 1935 classic The Bride of Frankenstein  (watch it HERE). The Bride! is currently making its way through production and unveiling images that are intriguing, even if there are jarring elements to them. So we thought this was a good time to put together a list of Everything We Know About The Bride!

STUDIO AND RELEASE DATE

The Bride! is not set up at Universal Pictures, so this isn’t an official remake of The Bride of Frankenstein, it’s a play on the same concepts found in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein that inspired the 1935 film. This isn’t the first Bride of Frankenstein remake to be made by a different company. In 1985, Columbia Pictures brought us another movie simply called The Bride, which starred Sting as Baron Charles Frankenstein, Jennifer Beals as Eva (the bride) and Clancy Brown as Viktor (the monster). A few years ago, it was announced that Scarlett Johansson was going to star in a similar project called Bride for A24 and Apple, but that still hasn’t made it into production. Universal has never made an official remake of the film, but that’s not to say they haven’t tried. A new Bride of Frankenstein has been drifting in and out of development hell at Universal for decades. Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice even wrote a screenplay for the re-do at one point, and during the Dark Universe days, Universal was developing a remake that was set to be directed by Bill Condon – who seemed to be the perfect choice, since he had directed the film Gods and Monsters, about the final days of Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale. David Koepp has written the script, Angelina Jolie and Gal Gadot were in the running to play The Bride. But then the Dark Universe crumbled and those plans were scrapped. 

Gyllenhaal’s Bride was originally rumored to be set up at the Netflix streaming service, but it has ended up at Warner Bros., with the studio planning to give the film a theatrical release, IMAX screens included, on October 3, 2025.

STORY

While the original story took place in Europe during the 1800s, Gyllenhaal has updated the concept, but hasn’t exactly modernized it. Her version moves the setting to America – Chicago, to be exact – in the 1930s. Despite the Chicago setting, the movie is actually being filmed in New York.

The story Gyllenhaal crafted for The Bride! has the following synopsis: A lonely Frankenstein travels to 1930s Chicago to seek the aide of a Dr. Euphronius in creating a companion for himself. The two reinvigorate a murdered young woman and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.

CAST

As you would expect, the Oscar-nominated actress-turned-writer/director has managed to assemble a strong cast for the project. The first two cast members to sign on were her The Dark Knight co-star Christian Bale and her husband Peter Sarsgaard. Penelope Cruz, Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, Julianne Hough, John Magaro, and Jeannie Berlin quickly joined them. When Cruz first joined the project, a production listing mistakenly had her down as playing the titular Bride, but that’s not the case. We don’t have details on all of the characters, but Peter Sarsgaard is rumored to be playing a detective, and we do know that the Bride, who may be named Myrna, is being played by Jessie Buckley, while Christian Bale takes on the role of Frankenstein’s Monster. During the build-up to the start of filming, Bale revealed that he would have to shave his head for the role – and jokingly said he might have to get on the rack, break his bones, and eat lots of fertilizer in order to grow and stretch to the proper height to play the character, who was described as being eight feet tall in Shelley’s novel.

IMAGES

As filming began, Gyllenhaal took to Instagram to share camera test images of Buckley as the Bride and Bale as the Monster. Spy pics of Buckley and Bale made up as their character on the set of the film later gave us a more revealing look at the pair. Buckley’s character wears a metal leg brace and has an untidy look; messy clothes, wild hair (as you would hope to see from the Bride), and she appears to be leaking some kind of black substance from a few different points on her body. Bale’s Monster has dirty, well-worn clothes and scars where his body was built out of stitched-together pieces taken from various corpses. The controversial part of his design, an element that has some comparing him to the likes of Jared Leto’s Joker and Bill Skarsgard’s Eric Draven, is a tattoo on his chest: the word “Hope.”