Universal Pictures and Working Title recently announced Isla Fisher as one of the new cast members for the upcoming Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth film of the British romantic film comedy franchise, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Joining Fisher and the rest of the returning cast are Josette Simon, Nico Parker and Leila Farzad. Ms. Jones herself, Renée Zellweger, will reprise her role. Hugh Grant is also returning as Daniel Cleaver. Emma Thompson, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leo Woodall were previously announced as part of the film’s cast.
Bridget Jones is back
Also reprising their roles as Bridget’s friends are Sarah Solemani, Sally Phillips, Shirley Henderson and James Callis, along with Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent, who return to play Bridget’s parents.
Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy will also see Celia Imrie, Neil Pearson and Joanna Scanlan in their original roles. The movie is set to hit theaters and on Peacock in the US in time for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, 2025.
Michael Morris will direct the movie, which is based on the best-selling 2013 novel by Helen Fielding. The story follows Bridget, now a widow, who’s trying to rejoin the dating scene. One new addition to the books is the inclusion of tweets and texts to her diary as she juggles work, family and love as a single mother in her early 50s.
Fielding wrote the script for the film adaptation, along with contributions from Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan. To date, the Bridget Jones films have earned more than $760 million worldwide.
Ms. Jones by the numbers
The last Bridget Jones movie was released in 2016, Bridget Jones’ Baby. It’s the lowest grossing among the three movies at $212 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. The first movie released in 2001 remains the highest grossing of the three films, grossing $334.3 million on the worldwide box office. It’s also the highest rated with an 80% Tomatometer and 81% audience score. On Metacritic, it received generally favorable reviews and it has a Cinemascore rating of B+.
In contrast, the second film is the lowest rated with only a 27% Tomatometer but with a friendlier 60% audience score.
The character Jones first appeared as a column in 1995 at The Independent, as Bridget Jones’s Diary, without a byline. It appeared as a 30-something single woman’s diary chronicling her life in London. Fielding intended it as a lampoon of how Cosmopolitan and other magazines portrayed British women’s issues with regard to love, marriage and romance. Fielding then novelized the column in 1996.
The author has said that she very loosely based the plot on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Bridget Jones’ Diary has been hailed as the start of the at the time new popular fiction genre known as “chick lit.” The sequel published in 1998 The Edge of Reason was also loosely based on another Austen novel Persuasion.
Fielding also said that he named the character Mark Darcy after Pride and Prejudice’s Fitzwilliam Darcy and patterned him exactly like Colin Firth who played the character in the 1995 BBC series adaptation. She met Firth for an interview in 1996, and asked him to collaborate on what ended up as an eight-page interview between Jones and Firth in The Edge of Reason.
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