Christian Bale is coming back to Chicago. At least on screen. Warner Bros.’ newly announced feature from writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Bride!, is set in 1930s Chicago and finds a lonely Frankenstein (Bale) seeking out a radical scientist (Annette Bening) to create him a companion, birthing Jessie Buckley’s title character and a combustible romance against a feverish, modernist backdrop.
The studio has the film opening exclusively in theaters and IMAX on March 6, 2026 (North America). Watch the trailer below:
For Chicago film fans, the premise reads like a homecoming. Bale’s last great dance with the city vaulted him into superhero lore: Christopher Nolan used downtown as Gotham for two of Bale’s caped crusader turns, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, cementing Lower Wacker, LaSalle Street, and the Board of Trade as cinematic icons.
But while The Bride! plants its flag narratively in Chicago, cameras didn’t roll here. Production took place mainly in and around New York State and New Jersey, including Ulster County in the Hudson Valley and metro-NJ hubs, doubling for the Windy City’s interwar grit. Gyllenhaal also staged sequences in New York City; her wrap post, thanking the “incredible crew in New York,” was a not-so-subtle hint.
That split between story and shoot isn’t unusual. Nolan himself blended Chicago with other locales to build Gotham’s mythos, but it does make the project an intriguing Chicago watch. The one-sheet’s logline teases murder, possession, and a radical cultural movement, suggesting a version of 1930s Chicago buzzing with art, industry, and unrest, the kind of milieu that can make a monster love story feel both classic and startlingly contemporary.
Gyllenhaal is working with a murderers’ row of collaborators and cast. Alongside Buckley, Bale, and Bening are Peter Sarsgaard, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Penélope Cruz, with a behind-the-camera team that includes DP Lawrence Sher, production designer Karen Murphy, editor Dylan Tichenor, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, costume designer Sandy Powell, and music supervisor Randall Poster—names that signal a meticulously crafted period world and a muscular, modern tone.
For Reel Chicago readers, the connective tissue is irresistible: Bale’s Batman era helped supercharge the city’s modern reputation as a blockbuster backlot; now he’s back—refracted through a Chicago-set Frankenstein myth penned and directed by a filmmaker with a keen eye for messy humanity.
Whether the skyline you’ll see was conjured in the Hudson Valley or Jersey backstreets, the soul of the story belongs to our town. And if past is prologue, expect Chicago to loom large in the film’s marketing and iconography as the monster and his bride step into the light next spring.
The Bride! opens March 6, 2026, in Chicago and North American theaters and IMAX; international release begins March 4.
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