There is more Bridget Jones coming with Renée Zellweger

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy starring Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant is in the works

By Mary Kate Carr  |  April 9, 2024 | 8:49pm
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There is more Bridget Jones coming with Renée Zellweger
Bridget Jones’s Baby Screenshot: Rotten Tomatoes Trailers/YouTube

A fourth Bridget Jones film is coming, which means the series has to come up with a convoluted new way to split up Bridget (Renée Zellweger) and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). The previous sequels began to strain belief as to why our favorite opposites-attract couple would keep breaking up, but this time it’s worse. Spoiler alert if you haven’t read the books and want to go into the movie blind—Mark Darcy is dead. Yes, this is an adaptation of Helen Fielding’s novel Mad About The Boy, in which she killed off Bridget’s soulmate to send her back out on silly single girl adventures, this time as a widowed 50-something single mother.

On the bright side, Daniel Cleaver is alive (despite Bridget having attended his funeral in the previous film—he was only presumed dead), so that means Hugh Grant is coming back, thank goodness. He’ll be joined by newcomers Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall, who recently proved himself a born romantic lead in the Netflix series One Day. Also returning is Emma Thompson, who played Bridget’s doctor in Bridget Jones’s Baby and also co-wrote the third film.

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, directed by To Leslie filmmaker Michael Morris, will follow the beloved rom-com heroine as she navigates everything from social media to single parenting. That’s in addition to her typical dating misadventures, which includes, per the book’s synopsis, “cross-generational sex” (with Woodall’s character, we must assume). The bumbling British character is perhaps the Texas-born actor’s most famous role; it earned Zellweger her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 2002.

Though, like many series, the Bridget Jones films suffer from diminishing returns, it’ll nevertheless be welcome to see Zellweger back in Bridget’s shoes again. If only we could say the same about Colin Firth, who played some version of Mr. Darcy on and off for over 20 years. Sadly, he’s gone the way of Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again: gone but not forgotten, and possibly leaving many audience members wondering: “Why even bother making this movie if you couldn’t get that actor back?”

 
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