The recent Bridget Jones sequel, a big hit at the UK box office, celebrates the romance between its middle-aged star and her gen-Z lover, but from Babygirl to The Mother, how do women on screen with younger partners usually fare?
At this admittedly early stage of 2025, with all the noisy blockbusters of summer still ahead of us, the UK’s box-office report tells a nostalgic story. The year’s highest-grossing new release, raking in more than double its nearest rival, Captain America, is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – a sequel in which its American distributors had so little confidence that they booted it straight to streaming. Brits who missed it in cinemas can finally access it on VOD this week. The film itself is something of a pleasant surprise too: a tender-hearted, flannel-cosy romcom – easily the best in the series since the first, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary – now suffused with the gentle melancholy of middle age.
Age, of course, is a critical concern of this instalment, which offers Renée Zellweger’s ever-plucky Bridget, now a widowed mother of two, a pair of romantic choices: Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nice, matchingly middle-aged schoolteacher, and Leo Woodall’s flashier gen-Z Lothario. You can probably guess who prevails, though the film seems pleasingly amenable to either option: the possibility of dating across a generation or two isn’t played for shaming comedy. In that respect, this otherwise familiar bit of comfort viewing is relatively fresh.
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