Bridesmaids (2011)

Bridesmaids is a 2011 American comedy film directed by Paul Feig from a screenplay by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. It stars Wiig as a woman who experiences a series of misfortunes after being asked to serve as maid of honor for her best friend, played by Maya Rudolph. The cast also features Rose Byrne, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Melissa McCarthy, and Chris O'Dowd.

Actresses Mumolo and Wiig wrote the screenplay after the latter was cast in Judd Apatow's comedy Knocked Up (2007). Bridesmaids premiered in Westwood, Los Angeles on April 28, 2011, and was theatrically released in the United States on May 13, 2011, by Universal Pictures. It grossed $306.5 million worldwide on a $32.5 million budget, and surpassed Knocked Up to become the top-grossing Apatow Productions film to date. At the 84th Academy Awards, McCarthy was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and Wiig and Mumolo for Best Original Screenplay.

Bridesmaids has served as a touchstone for discussion about women in comedy. Several publications have ranked it among the best comedy films of the 21st century.

Plot

Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) is a single, underachieving woman living in Milwaukee. Following the Great Recession, her bakery went out of business. She now works a stressful, underpaid job at a jewelry store and shares an apartment with obnoxious roommates. She regularly has casual sex with the wealthy, self-absorbed Ted (Jon Hamm). The only positive presence in Annie's life is her lifelong best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph).

When Lillian becomes engaged to her boyfriend Doug, she asks Annie to be her maid of honor. At the engagement party, Annie meets Lillian's other bridesmaids: Lillian's cousin Rita; Lillian's coworker Becca; Doug's sister Megan; and Helen, the wife of Doug's boss. Annie and Helen are jealous of each other's friendships with Lillian and compete for her attention.

On the way home from the engagement party, Annie is pulled over by police officer Nathan Rhodes (Chris O'Dowd) due to her erratic driving. She completes a sobriety test, which she passes, however a ticket is written for broken brake lights. The pair get talking and Officer Rhodes realizes that Annie was the owner of 'Cake Baby' (Annie's former bakery). Annie looks upset about being given a ticket, which Officer Rhodes agrees to rescind as long as she gets her taillights fixed.

Lillian and her bridesmaids have lunch at a Brazilian restaurant chosen by Annie. Annie then takes them to a high-end bridal-dress boutique. With the exception of Helen (who did not eat the meat at the restaurant), the women are all stricken with food poisoning. As Rita vomits into a toilet at the boutique, Becca vomits on Rita, and Megan defecates into the bathroom sink. While wearing an haute couture wedding dress, Lillian tries to rush through traffic to reach another bathroom; she then succumbs to diarrhea, defecating in the street.

Annie's subsequent suggestion for a bachelorette party at Lillian's parents' lake house is overruled in favor of a Las Vegas trip planned by Helen. On the plane there, Annie accepts a sedative and liquor from Helen to alleviate her fear of flying and becomes intoxicated and belligerent toward airline staff. She then starts hallucinating and suffers a paranoid breakdown that culminates in her being tackled by Megan and apprehended by an air marshal. The plane makes an emergency landing, and the party takes a bus home. Lillian then decides that Helen should take over the planning of the bridal shower and wedding.

Meanwhile, Annie grows closer to Nathan Rhodes. As a former regular customer at Annie's bakery, he repeatedly encourages her to open a new bakery; she is apprehensive. Following a romantic night together, she abruptly leaves when Nathan surprises her with baking supplies the next morning.

Annie is fired from her job for a profanity-laden argument with a teenage customer. After being evicted by her roommates, she moves in with her mother. Annie travels to Helen's home in Chicago for Lillian's Parisian-themed bridal shower—an idea of Annie's that Helen had previously rejected. When Helen upstages Annie's heartfelt gift by surprising Lillian with a trip to Paris, Annie flies into a profane tirade, loudly berating Lillian and Helen and destroying the decorations. The subsequent argument between Annie and Lillian ends with Annie storming out of the bridal shower and Lillian disinviting her from the wedding.

While driving home, Annie's still-broken taillights lead to a car accident. The responding officer is Nathan, who admonishes her for not taking responsibility for herself. Ted arrives shortly afterward, offering Annie a ride. When he asks Annie to perform fellatio on him as he drives, she demands to be let out of the car and walks home.

Megan visits Annie, motivating her to take control of her life. Annie fixes her car, takes up baking again, and tries to reconcile with Nathan; Nathan ignores her. On the day of the wedding, Helen comes to Annie, begging for help to find a missing Lillian. During their search, Helen tearfully confesses that most people only hung out with her for her event-planning skills, that she does not have any girlfriends nor true friends, and that she feels unsatisfied in her marriage.

With some begrudging help from Nathan, Annie and Helen find Lillian in her apartment. Lillian is overwhelmed by Helen's extravagant wedding planning and is afraid of leaving her life in Milwaukee. Annie reconciles with Lillian and resumes her role as maid of honor. After the wedding, Annie and Helen agree to get dinner together, officially becoming friends. Nathan then arrives unexpectedly. Annie and Nathan kiss before riding away in Nathan's police car.

Cast

Major uncredited appearances include: Jon Hamm as Ted, Annie's sex buddy; Grammy Award-winning accordionist, pianist, and composer Nick Ariondo as the accordion player; former SNL cast members Melanie Hutsell and Nancy Carell as two women on the tennis court, and Emmy, Drama Desk and Grammy Award winner Pat Carroll as the old woman in the car.

The film's co-writers, Wiig and Annie Mumolo, appear together when Mumolo plays the nervous woman on the plane, while director Paul Feig appears uncredited as a wedding guest.

Paul Rudd was to appear as a man whom Annie goes on a blind date with, but the scene was cut from the final film.

Mia Rose Frampton appears briefly as a thirteen-year-old girl who argues with Annie in the jewelry store; the film's Blu-ray release includes an extended, ten-minute scene of improvised dialogue between the two.

Wilson Phillips appear as themselves late in the film when they perform their song "Hold On".

Production

Writing

The script, originally titled Maid of Honor, was written by actress and screenwriter Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig. Friends for years, they met at The Groundlings, a Los Angeles-based improvisational comedy troupe where they wrote sketches with one another, in the early 2000s. The basic premise for the film originated in 2006, shortly after Wiig was cast in the supporting role of a passive-aggressive cable television executive in producer Judd Apatow's comedy film Knocked Up (2007). Recognizing her comedic talent, Apatow asked Wiig if she had any ideas for a screenplay herself – a practice which had previously led to Steve Carell's idea for The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) – and she and Mumolo soon came up with Bridesmaids. Over the following years, writing commenced, with Wiig working on Saturday Night Live in New York City and Mumolo grinding out the script in Los Angeles. The two would meet on weekends and conduct semi-regular table reads of drafts for Apatow to get his suggestions and notes. Filmmaker Paul Feig came across Wiig and Mumolo's script in 2007. When Feig signed on as director and the script got the greenlight for production in 2010, Feig said, "There was an edict from Hollywood where they were all going, 'Okay this is a movie starring a bunch of women. If this works, we'll greenlight more, and if it doesn't, we won't...I was really sweating because if this didn't work then I'm basically the man who killed movies for women for eternity. So, thank God it worked."

Casting and filming

Several actresses, including Rebel Wilson and Busy Philipps (the latter of whom had worked with Apatow and Feig on their comedy-drama television series Freaks and Geeks), auditioned for the role of Megan. Wilson, who improvised for Apatow and Feig for an hour during her audition, impressed them so much that she was later cast in the smaller role of Brynn. It marked her first appearance in an American production, and she allegedly received $3,500, all of which went toward paying fees to join the Screen Actors Guild. Mindy Kaling read for the role of Lillian, eventually losing to Wiig's Saturday Night Live colleague Maya Rudolph. Rose Byrne initially also auditioned for Lillian, but later took the opportunity to read Helen. Byrne was eventually chosen as the nemesis because she wasn't a comedian as Feig feared the character would be "coming out to be too arch if we had a funny woman doing it." Greta Gerwig and Judy Greer also auditioned for unspecified roles.

Bridesmaids was budgeted at $32.5 million. Although primarily set in Milwaukee and Chicago, principal photography took place in Los Angeles. Production designer Jefferson Sage, who has worked with Apatow and Paul Feig since their Freaks and Geeks days, noted that the first fact that appealed to him about the project "was that you had these two disparate worlds: There was Annie's world in Milwaukee, and then there was Helen's world in Chicago. It immediately drew this dichotomy between the rivalry that developed between them." However, Sage acknowledged that it was a challenge to find "architecture that would give us those Midwestern worlds. Chicago is a beautiful, distinctive city architecturally, and restricted views of downtown L.A. feel like Chicago." The production decided to use the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden as the location for Lillian and Dougie's wedding. Additional scenes where Annie meets Officer Rhodes on the highways between Milwaukee and Chicago were filmed in Oxnard, California, which Sage described as a "broad, flat, green area away from mountains."

Reception

Critical response

Bridesmaids received positive reviews upon its release, with praise towards Wiig and Mumolo's screenplay and McCarthy's performance. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 89% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 294 reviews, with an average score of 7.60/10. The site's critical consensus states: "A marriage of genuine characters, gross out gags, and pathos, Bridesmaids is a female-driven comedy that refuses to be boxed in as Kristen Wiig emerges as a real star." Metacritic gives the film a score of 75 out of 100 based on reviews from 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 stars of out 4, and said that Bridesmaids "seems to be a more or less deliberate attempt to cross the Chick Flick with the Raunch Comedy. It definitely proves that women are the equal of men in vulgarity, sexual frankness, lust, vulnerability, overdrinking and insecurity ... Love him or not, Judd Apatow is consistently involved with movies that connect with audiences." Tamara Winfrey-Harris noted in Ms. that, to her "enduring surprise", despite the involvement of Apatow, and themes that had been "done and done and done", the film passed the Bechdel test of female-driven storylines.

Critic Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly pointed out the significance of Bridesmaids' success as follows: "So far, the message that Hollywood seems to have taken from the incredible success of Bridesmaids is a predictably reductive one, something along the lines of: Hey, look! Raunchy comedies for women with awesome grossout scenes in the middle of them can be big box office too!! The message that Hollywood should be taking is: A comedy that's raunchy and fearless, and also brilliantly written and shrewdly honest about what's really going on in women's lives, may actually connect with the fabled non-teenage audience (remember them?)."

Many critics, like Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon (who called Bridesmaids the "first black president of female-driven comedies") labeled the film as "a breakthrough for female-centered comedy, and feminist to boot." It was also credited with proving that "women could pull off a good fart joke as well as the next guy, and did what seemed like the impossible: leading an all-female cast to blockbuster success." O'Dowd's performance also won positive reviews, despite his limited screentime.

Despite the majority of praise, the film was not without its detractors. Abby Koenig of The Houston Press enjoyed Kristen Wiig's comedic talents, but disliked the frequency of "raunchy jokes" throughout the film, writing that "we need more funny females getting the spotlight. However, we also need women that can crack you up without making you watch them have diarrhea". Karina Longworth of The Village Voice criticised the inconsistency of the film's tone, stating that certain scenes have "a kind of dumb crassness that works against Bridesmaids' often smart, highly class-conscious deconstruction of female friendship and competition. Comedy of humiliation is one thing; a fat lady shitting in a sink is another."

In 2021, members of Writers Guild of America West (WGAW) and Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) ranked its screenplay 12th in WGA's 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (so far). In 2025, the film ranked number 32 on The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century" and number 90 on the "Readers' Choice" edition of the list.

Box office

Bridesmaids surpassed Knocked Up to become the top-grossing Judd Apatow production to date, grossing $26,247,410 on its opening weekend and settling for a strong second place behind Thor. Bridesmaids grossed $169,525,235 at the North American box office, and $119,635,696 in international markets, for a worldwide total of $289,160,931. Universal reported that males made up 33 percent of the movie's audience and that 63 percent of the audience was over the age of 30. Speaking on the film's surprising international success, producer Judd Apatow said: "When we worked on Bridesmaids, the discussion was that we weren't going to release it in many foreign countries because the concept of bridesmaids wasn't in a lot of cultures. When it was so successful in the United States, it did really well around the world. That was a wonderful surprise."

Accolades

McCarthy was nominated for the 2011 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role.

Home media

Bridesmaids was released on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in theatrical (125 minutes) and unrated (130 minutes) versions on September 20, 2011. Special features include a Line-O-Rama (a feature popular among Apatow releases), deleted, extended, and alternate scenes, and a Cholodecki's jewelry store commercial. Another edition commemorating the 100th anniversary of Universal Studios was released on September 4, 2012.

Cancelled sequel

Although there was interest in developing a sequel to Bridesmaids, producer Apatow said, "The key is we have to come up with an idea that is as good or better than the first one" and director Paul Feig said, "Everyone's very busy right now is one of the problems, and kind of doing their own thing, but we're very open to it." When asked about her potential involvement, Wiig told The Hollywood Reporter, "We aren't working on that. Annie [Mumolo] and I aren't planning a sequel. We are writing something else." Following Wiig's statement, reports surfaced that Universal was interested in proceeding without her, instead focusing on developing a story about McCarthy's character Megan. McCarthy dispelled the rumors that she would consider returning for a sequel without Wiig saying, "God, I wouldn't want to. I would never want to. I think it's a terrible idea. I don't know anything about it. But I know that nobody wants to do it unless it's great. If it is, I will show up wherever those ladies are."

References

External links

Official website at the Wayback Machine (archived October 8, 2011)

Bridesmaids at IMDb

Bridesmaids at Box Office Mojo

Bridesmaids at The Numbers