Nearly a decade after Bridget Jones’s Baby, Hugh Grant and Renée Zellweger will return to the franchise. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy will be the fourth movie in the series, and the third to include Grant (who opted out of 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby). Michael Leslie is set to direct the movie, which will also star Emma Thompson (Love Actually), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Venom: The Last Dance) and Leo Woodall (The White Lotus). The movie is based on a novel by Helen Fielding, whose Bridget Jones series has generated upwards of $750 million at the global box office to date.
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Published in 2013, Mad About the Boy was a look into the 2010s dating scene by way of Bridget Jones’s unique lens. Here’s the official synopsis for the book:
What do you do when a girlfriend’s 60th birthday party is the same day as your boyfriend’s 30th? Is it wrong to lie about your age when online dating? Is it morally wrong to have a blow-dry when one of your children has head lice? Does the Dalai Lama actually tweet or is it his assistant? Is technology now the fifth element? Or is that wood? Is sleeping with someone after 2 dates and 6 weeks of texting the same as getting married after 2 meetings and 6 months of letter writing in Jane Austen’s day? Pondering these, and other modern dilemmas, Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of single-motherhood, tweeting, texting and redisovering her sexuality in what SOME people rudely and outdatedly call ‘middle age’. The long-awaited return of a much-loved character, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is timely, tender, touching, witty, wise and bloody hilarious.
Deadline, who first broke the casting news, note that Thompson, who co-wrote the script for 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, was introduced in that movie playing Bridget’s OB-GYN. Now that she’s old enough that she presumably isn’t having kids anymore, one could wonder what role Thompson plays in the new movie, but it’s easy enough to handwave that to bring a beloved character back.
Colin Firth, who competed for Bridget’s love in the first three films, is apparently not returning. The report suggests that Universal’s plan is to have the movie release in theaters internationally and on Peacock in the U.S. on Valentine’s Day 2025.
Grant last appeared in Warner Bros.’ Wonka. Zellwegger was all over the internet yesterday, as social media celebrated her ’90s cult classic Empire Records.
