‘Pre-sales are bigger than Barbie’: Bridget Jones 4 set to break box office records – despite no US cinema release

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As the Oscars draw near, cinemas are gearing up for a significant rise in interest in one extremely popular film. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth instalment in the unfortunate romantic escapades of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones, may not have a strong chance of dominating the Academy Awards, but it is expected to be a hit with audiences across the UK over the Valentine's Day period – and in the weeks that follow.

"We're expecting it to be one of the biggest releases of the year in the UK, the largest British film of the year, and the biggest box office for the first half of 2025," says Robert Mitchell, director of box office analysis at Gower Street Analytics.

“Pre-sales are even higher than for hit films like Barbie,” said Eduardo Leal, group Regional Director of screen content for the Vue cinema chain. “It's likely to be the largest box office opening for a Bridget Jones film to date.”

Nine years on from Renée Zellweger's hapless journalist giving birth to a child in Bridget Jones's Baby, she's now a mother of two, but without a partner, as human rights lawyer Mark Darcy has been killed off while doing charity work in Sudan. Colin Firth makes a number of ghostly yet still suave appearances in the new film, which are heavily featured in the trailer.

Resurrected, on the other hand, is the nefarious smoothie-maker Daniel Cleaver, who was assumed to have met a tragic end in Bridget, but is now back in the picture with dialogue refined by the inimitable Hugh Grant.

The film is being marketed as a more light-hearted choice compared to other, more intense awards contenders such as the post-Holocaust drama The Brutalist and September 5, which is based on the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack. The latest Bridget Jones film also offers a female-led alternative to more mainstream new releases, including Captain America: Brave New World, Marvel's new superhero movie starring Harrison Ford and Anthony Mackie.

We're forecasting a great Valentine's weekend with a perfect blend of films for all tastes," says Mitchell. "I believe Bridget is well-positioned as an alternative to Captain America.

However, this happy combination of a good film and the right release date is an exclusive one, for in the US the film is skipping cinemas and going straight to streaming platforms. Such a vast difference in release expectations between the two regions is almost unheard of. Usually, the reasons for major differences in release strategies are due to cultural differences; a biopic about Ronald Reagan starring Dennis Quaid did well in southern America last year but failed to secure a release in the UK.

Some genres, such as faith films and some of the work of US actor Tyler Perry, struggle to make a significant impact with UK distributors, who are only willing to distribute them digitally rather than taking a bigger risk. At the same time, the experimental Robbie Williams film, which imagines him as a CGI chimpanzee, bewildered American audiences and made only a quarter of the $8m (£6.4m) it earned at home in the UK.

However, the Bridget Jones films have been generating decreasing box office returns in the US since the start. The first film managed to secure 25% of its impressive £196 million global box office total in the US in 2001; by the second, in 2004, this had dropped to 15% (of a £194 million total). In 2016, Bridget Jones's Baby fared even worse, with just 11% of its eventual takings coming from the US. That £15 million (of a £169 million total) was, however, more than tripled in the UK, where the film broke a considerable number of records and was the third highest-grossing film of the year.

For Mad About the Boy, distribution company Universal Pictures and the production company Working Title secured a deal for US rights with the streamer Peacock prior to production commencing, but some are now pondering whether reservations about its American potential may have been unfounded.

Preliminary feedback on the film, whose reviews are under embargo until 12 February, has been very positive, with many praising its innovative approach and staying power, even with the central love triangle now featuring two new characters: Chiwetel Ejiofor (a strict yet physically fit science teacher) and Leo Woodall (a physically robust parks supervisor).

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The central tension of the film – the on-again-off-again affair between the characters played by Zellweger, who is 55, and Woodall, who is 28 – is very apt, with relationships between older women and their younger male partners proving a box office draw in the past year, as seen with films featuring Anne Hathaway and Nicole Kidman.

Numerous people, including Grant, have also pointed out that Mad About the Boy has high-quality writing, particularly when it comes to the theme of grief, which is a central element of Fielding's 2013 novel on which this episode is based, and is faithfully captured by the film's co-writer Abi Morgan. Reportedly, the tone is significantly more mature and whilst tackling more complex themes compared to its predecessors, and its visual style is also much bolder – thanks, possibly, to director Michael Morris, whose most recent film was the acclaimed drama To Leslie, set in Texas and featuring an alcoholic single mother.

Two years ago, that film earned its star Andrea Riseborough an unexpected Academy Awards nomination, so don't count Bridget out just yet.