Bridget Jones is heading back to the screen.
After months of quiet chess-pieces moves, Universal Pictures and Working Title have finally put in place the talent for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth installment of the British-based romantic film comedy series.
Renée Zellweger is set to return as the lovable but flailing-at-life Jones, as is Hugh Grant as rapscallion Daniel Cleaver. Emma Thompson, who appeared in the 2016 entry, Bridget Jones’s Baby, is back as well, while newcomers include Chiwetel Ejiofor and up-and-comer Leo Woodall, best known for his work in season two of The White Lotus.
Michael Morris, who helmed the Andrea Riseborough drama To Leslie, will be sitting in the director’s chair when cameras roll for the feature, which adapts the best-selling 2013 novel by Jones creator Helen Fielding. Fielding also wrote the script.
Readers and audiences have seen Jones have love triangles, find romance and even have a baby, but in the novel Mad About a Boy, the woman found new levels of embarrassment as tweets and texts were added to her diary as her forms of expression. Jones is now navigating life, work, family and love as a 51-year-old single mother and widow, to boot (I know, right?!). And of course, there’s the hot sex with a 30-year old man.
Universal will release the rom-com on Peacock on Valentine’s Day 2025, while internationally it will be released in theaters.
Zellweger first played Jones in the 2001 adaptation, which not only proved to be a massive hit, it earned her an Oscar nomination for best actress. Grant and Colin Firth also starred in the movie, with the trio returning for the 2004 sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Grant sat out 2016’s Bridget Jones’s Baby, though Zellweger and Firth returned.
The trio of movies have made more than $760 million at the worldwide box office.
