Christian Bale's The Bride cost Warner Bros. $90 million in theaters — is it a streaming flop on HBO Max too?

Let's start with the part nobody at Warner Bros. wants to relive. The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal's punk-gothic riff on Bride of Frankenstein, opened on March 6, 2026, to $7.3 million domestically and $13.6 million worldwide. That debut snapped Warner Bros.' streak of nine straight No. 1 openings, and industry sources told Deadline the movie could lose close to $90 million by the time home entertainment was done with it. That's on top of a production budget somewhere between $80 million and $90 million, plus roughly $65 million in marketing.

Christian Bale plays Frank, a lonely, very lovesick monster in 1930s Chicago. Jessie Buckley plays the murdered woman Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening) brings back to be his companion. Jake Gyllenhaal, Penélope Cruz, and Peter Sarsgaard are in it too. On paper, that's a lot of movie stars. At the box office, it went like this:

• A C+ CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences.
• A second-weekend drop of about 70%.
• A final worldwide gross of roughly $24 million.
• A 57% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, against a 70% audience score.

It didn't help that Warner Bros. had already moved the movie off its original fall 2025 date, partly to keep it away from Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, which went on to collect nine Oscar nominations. Gyllenhaal also spent a chunk of her press tour talking about how rough the test screenings were, including one studio note in particular:

"Maggie, you cannot have Frankenstein lick black vomit off the Bride's neck."

— A Warner Bros. executive's note, as recounted on The New York Times' The Interview

Then it hit HBO Max

The Bride! started streaming worldwide on HBO Max on May 22, 2026, and the reaction was not what anyone who'd read the box office reports would have predicted. According to FlixPatrol, it climbed to No. 2 on HBO Max's global movie chart within a day. Two days in, it was the most-watched movie on the platform worldwide. At its peak, it was trending in 56 countries and sat at No. 1 in 17 of them, the US included. On June 14, 2026, it was still in HBO Max's top 10 in 19 countries, at No. 4 in the US and No. 8 globally.

A movie that couldn't crack $25 million in theaters was HBO Max's most-watched movie on the planet two days after it landed there.

So is it a streaming flop?

By every public number available, no. There are caveats, though, and they're big ones. A strong showing on a subscription service doesn't put ticket money back in the studio's pocket. FlixPatrol tracks where a title sits on a platform's daily top 10 lists, not how many hours people actually spent watching it. And HBO Max doesn't publish weekly viewing data the way Netflix does, so Warner Bros. Discovery hasn't released a viewership number for The Bride! that I could find.