I still maintain that the first Bridget Jones’s Diary movie is a masterpiece. I love that movie (and the book) and Renee Zellweger absolutely deserved all of the awards, nominations and praise she got for it. But every film after that has gotten progressively worse. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason had some okay parts, but it was pretty bad overall. Bridget Jones’s Baby was catastrophically bad. And I do not have high hopes for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. There were rumors for years that Renee wanted to make another Bridget film, and they finally put everything together this year.

If you’ve read Helen Fielding’s book, you know that the setup for Mad About the Boy is a huge bummer, and the first trailer doesn’t pull its punches. You know upfront that Mark Darcy has died and that Bridget is a widow with a young son and daughter. The whole storyline is about Bridget getting back into the dating pool as a single mother over 50. From the trailer, it looks like Colin Firth returned for some ghostly appearances, and Hugh Grant also returned for what is possibly an extended cameo. But the bulk of the action falls to Leo Woodall (playing Bridget’s much-younger lover) and Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing a handsome and age-appropriate man in Bridget’s orbit. The trailer:

Yeah… I’m happy for Chiwetel, because he usually doesn’t get roles like this, where he’s playing a straight-forward romantic lead. But this doesn’t look great. That being said, it looks like a pretty straight-forward adaptation of the book, so at least there are no huge surprises. In fact, the biggest surprise is that they’ve dumped this on streaming – it will be on Peacock exclusively, with no theatrical run. Interesting. They must not have a lot of faith in it.

Photos courtesy of Working Title, Backgrid, Avalon Red.