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Jessie Buckley is predicted to clinch the Best Actress Oscar this weekend for her powerful role in the emotional drama Hamnet. Her increasing fame seemed poised to boost her latest project, the high-budget horror film The Bride!, crafted by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who previously directed Buckley to an Oscar nomination with 2021’s The Lost Daughter. However, contrary to expectations, The Bride! turned out to be a financial disappointment, drawing unexpected parallels to the 2007 Eddie Murphy comedy Norbit.
The theory behind these comparisons is rooted in Murphy’s experience during the Oscar season for 2006’s Dreamgirls. At the time, Murphy was a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor, but the release of Norbit during the voting period is believed to have undermined his chances. Norbit, noted for its broad, crude humor, featured Murphy in three roles, including a henpecked character and an eccentric orphanage owner. Despite its negative reviews, Norbit was a box office success, outperforming films like Bowfinger and nearly matching Dreamgirls in revenue.
Ultimately, Murphy lost the Oscar to Alan Arkin from Little Miss Sunshine, despite the hype surrounding Murphy’s first serious role in years. This loss gave rise to the notion that Norbit had derailed Murphy’s Oscar prospects. Since then, any underwhelming performance by an Oscar nominee released early in the year has been jokingly labeled as a potential “Norbit” scenario.
Over the years, several performers have been suspected of “Norbit”-ing, such as Anne Hathaway, who had Bride Wars in theaters while she was recognized for Rachel Getting Married. Similarly, Natalie Portman faced this with No Strings Attached during her campaign for Black Swan, which eventually secured her an Oscar in 2011. Nicole Kidman was in the spotlight for her small part in Just Go With It while she was nominated for Rabbit Hole. In 2015, both Julianne Moore (Still Alice/Seventh Son) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything/Jupiter Ascending) were speculated to be at risk, yet both emerged victorious. Even Entertainment Weekly speculated about pre-Norbit films that might have suffered similar fates.
Despite these analyses, none of the movies mentioned seems to have significantly influenced the award outcomes. Portman’s win meant Kidman couldn’t claim victory, and Hathaway, not the frontrunner that year, saw her nomination as a reward. It’s intriguing to note that such perceived career setbacks, like Buckley’s in The Bride!, often involve women, though the original concept stems from Murphy’s experience. This contrast between commercial roles and artistic aspirations has shifted into a narrative questioning women’s choices and dignity. The underlying message seems to inquire whether a woman can be honored for roles that are deemed too frivolous or commercially driven, a challenge faced by many actors throughout their careers.
The Bride! obviously isn’t a nakedly commercial play – Warner Bros. is probably wishing it had been – but it certainly brings up questions of decorum. It’s specifically well-positioned to capitalize on the usual awards-season grumbling about a frontrunner, in this case that she’s simply doing too much in Hamnet: Too much emoting, too much painful wailing, too much affecting confusion and disorientation when her character, the wife of William Shakespeare, sees a production of his play Hamlet for the first time. (It seems to be true, though, that the real Mrs. Shakespeare had relatively little interest in her husband’s work, and in any event, this fictional movie character certainly isn’t a seasoned theatergoer.)
The Bride! specifically doubles down on that muchness: Buckley plays a ’30s moll who is possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (!), killed, and then resurrected in a daze of feminist fury, giving her the freedom to dance, shout, and speak in multiple accents. It’s a lot, and it’s also perfect for any Hamnet haters: See! Vindication! She’s too much! Too much-ness is also the subject and style of The Bride!; Gyllenhaal very much aims for something well over the top, and happily affronts good taste, decency, etc., in a particularly middle-aged-feminist way that will make plenty of people cringe. Buckley, with her theater-kid energy, never flinches. She gives exactly the kind of performance this material demands, for better or worse.
The same could be said of Norbit, for that matter. Murphy co-wrote that film with his late brother Charlie, and it’s very much in the vein of his Nutty Professor-era makeup-assisted shapeshifting. Murphy has held fast that he still enjoys Norbit and finds it funny, and simply doesn’t agree that it’s one of his worst movies ever – a refreshing change from the 21st century trend of actors gaining press-tour cred by throwing this or that movie under the bus on demand.
Moreover, when all is said and done, it’s pretty unlikely that Norbit cost Murphy “his” Oscar – or at least, not specifically Norbit so much as racist unspoken demands placed on a Black performer, even or especially one as popular as Murphy. (He gets into this in a particularly funny scene from, you guessed it, Bowfinger, with his paranoid superstar character ranting about just what it takes for a white guy to get an Oscar while Black actors tend to be rewarded for playing slaves; the language is difficult to repeat in 2026, but it climaxes with him sarcastically ordering his agent to find him a part as “Buck, the Wonder Slave.”) Maybe Norbit gave Oscar voters all the excuse they needed to go with the old white guy instead. It’s also possible that the visibility of a crude hit like Norbit did exacerbate some industry annoyance with Murphy, who has been described as a sometimes-difficult figure to work with. Or maybe voters found it especially “difficult” that Murphy bravely called out the Academy for their lack of diversity at the 1988 Oscars – while presenting Best Picture, no less! There’s also the possibility that Dreamgirls itself never had the awards juice everyone assumed it did. This was, after all, a movie some folks thought might win Best Picture… before it failed to be nominated in that category at all.
More likely, it was all of that stuff rolled together, not Norbit in particular, that denied Murphy a win. On a purely technical level, Oscar voting closed before The Bride! was actually in theaters, so while some Academy voters may have seen it beforehand, the likelihood that it could affect Buckley’s chances is close to nil. This might not be the last time The Bride! is mentioned in conjunction with the big awards, though. Whatever you think of the film, its makeup, costume design, and art direction is pretty terrific work from some heavy-hitters in the industry. And a year after Murphy lost the Oscar, Norbit was back: It was nominated for a Best Makeup Oscar in 2008. Maybe Norbit-ing is just the realization that Oscars are not necessarily always where you’re looking for them.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.