According to three UK cinema chains, advance sales for the new Bridget Jones are tracking ahead of Barbie, Wicked and Paddington 3.
This is a sentence we weren’t expecting to type on a rainy Friday: Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy is outselling Barbie a week ahead of its release, according to three cinema chains talking to Screen UK.
As of yesterday morning, Odeon (the largest multiplex chain in the UK) had sold 70,000 tickets – ahead of Greta Gerwig’s £95.7m-grossing blockbuster a week ahead of release. Fellow multiplex goliath Vue said numbers were similarly tracking ahead of the pink phenomenon, while Curzon reported pre-sales were 20% ahead of Barbie as of this morning.
That doesn’t mean Bridget can uncork the champagne just yet: forecasts for UK and Ireland opening weekend box office are closer to the £8.1m achieved by Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016 than Barbie’s £18.5m in 2023. According to Screen, the numbers we’re seeing right now are more likely thanks to a canny Valentine’s Day release date and the character’s existing fanbase than an indicator Universal have a billion-dollar hit on their hands (not least because the film is skipping cinemas entirely in the US). Jones also finds herself competing for screen space with Marvel flick Captain America: Brave New World – though it’s perfectly possible that this could end up providing perfect counter-programming to the 15-rated Mad About The Boy.
Still, the folks at Digital Cinema Media are suggesting this could still be a genuine blockbuster in the Bridget-obsessed UK market: they’re predicting Mad About The Boy could finish 3rd at the overall box office by the end of the year, behind only Avatar: Fire And Ash and Wicked: For Good. Not bad for a rom-com – another genre more or less exorcised from the big screen in recent years.
The film could be looking at a final UK box office haul over the £50m mark, ahead of the likes of Dune: Part Two, Moana 2 and fellow beloved British franchise Paddington In Peru, all released in 2024. It might be a bit of a stretch, but there’s certainly a world where the film overtakes a certain young bear (£9.65m) as the biggest opening for a British film since No Time To Die (£25.9m).
It’s more evidence, too, that female-targeted movies are far from the box office poison they were labelled as for so long – after eking out a few million quid over the Christmas period, the first Wicked ended its cinema run as the UK’s highest-grossing 2024 release, beating out family-favourite Inside Out 2 and the male-skewing Deadpool & Wolverine. With Barbie beating Wonka and Oppenheimer to the same title in 2023, the UK market is looking particularly welcoming to a much wider variety of films than we were seeing top the charts a few years ago.
All this without much in the way of word of mouth – the review embargo for Jones’ latest outing doesn’t expire until Wednesday. If the film proves a hit with audiences, there’s no telling where the noughties rom-com icon could end up…
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy arrives in UK cinemas 14th February.
