On the red carpet at the 79th EE BAFTA Film Awards on February 22, 2026, Maggie Gyllenhaal did not hold back with her words, cutting through the festivities with a stark reminder that the progress story for women filmmakers might be more fiction than fact. Gyllenhaal, whose ambitious Frankenstein reimagining, The Bride!, is set to release on March 6, 2026, referenced a statistic that landed with a resounding thud: “7% of the movies this year or last year were directed by women but so many of the movies we are talking about are those 7%.” However, it’s also true that some of the most prominent movies currently in the awards conversation are from that small percentage.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! becomes a high-stakes Hollywood odd
The point, of course, wasn’t about the presence or absence of women with impressive skill sets, but rather about access to capital. “There’s a whole lot of women with directorial minds and stories they want to tell. We just need the people to finance those movies and get behind them.” Gyllenhaal knows this from personal experience, as The Bride! was originally set up at Netflix, then dropped, before Warner Bros. stepped in with the $80 million budget for the female-directed, auteur-driven, genre-oriented epic.
The movie itself has become one of Hollywood’s most discussed odds. Early test screenings have seen whispers among some executives that the movie is “too stylized” to be easily understood. Conversely, some have argued that the fact that the movie doesn’t easily fit into any genre category—a Gothic romance heist set in 1930s Chicago with musical elements—is exactly what makes the movie work.
The first trailer has clearly changed the narrative surrounding the movie, however. Christian Bale’s greatly modified monster has garnered much intrigue, while Jessie Buckley’s Bride has been said to lead a “radical social revolution” instead of being merely a creation. Peter Sarsgaard has called the movie “pure punk”—a genre much closer to cult classics than traditional monster lore.
The problem for Warner Bros., however, is the looming specter of Guillermo del Toro’s own Frankenstein adaptation at Netflix. The stakes are huge considering that the movie will need to earn at least $200 to $250 million at the global box office to merely break even. The point that Gyllenhaal has been trying to make all along is that bold visions by women are hardly uncommon—the willingness to fund them is what’s at issue here.
