What exactly is a punk Frankenstein supposed to look like in Maggie Gyllenhaal‘s new film “The Bride?” Audiences finally found out when Warner Bros. Pictures gave a first look at Gyllenhaal’s new take on the “Bride of Frankenstein” story at CinemaCon.

Starring Christian Bale, Jessie Buckley, Annette Bening, Penelope Cruz, and Peter Sarsgaard, “The Bride” is part of an ambitious slate for Warner Bros., which has a number of expensive and daring auteur projects mixed in with some franchise tentpoles. Gyllenhaal has already shared a few first looks, and Gyllenhaal’s husband Sarsgaard has touted the film’s artistic risks, calling it “punk” and “fast and really emotional,” something he believed would play for adults and teenagers alike.

As for what we officially saw in the Colosseum at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, the first trailer for the film showed Buckley’s character falling down a flight of stairs in what she believes is an accident, only for Bale’s Frankenstein monster to revive her in a mess of wires, with him saying “It wasn’t an accident. Everything they did, they did it on purpose. There is nothing left to do now but live.”

The trailer has an intense, industrial rock score, with the two brandishing guns like Bonnie and Clyde and Frankenstein beating a man to a pulp in an alley. The caption describes it as “The Mother Fucking Bride,” and it ends with a black and white shot of Buckley’s head in a bell jar saying “monstrous.”

Gyllenhaal and Buckley both appeared on stage to discuss the film. Gyllenhaal said that after her debut feature “The Lost Daughter,” which also starred Buckley, she said she wanted something “pop and big, and I wanted it to be radical at the same time,” and was inspired when she saw a man with a “Bride of Frankenstein” tattoo on his arm. In the original monster movie, the Bride of Frankenstein appears for only three minutes and doesn’t speak, and that’s definitely not what happens here.

“What happens if that Bride that comes back is beyond [Frankenstein’s] wildest imagination and doesn’t fit into the box or the world he has imagined for her,” Gyllenhaal said. “All of us have a little aspect of something monstrous from us, that’s why we all love monsters…they do monstrous things, but they’re also our heroes.”

Buckley said reading Gyllenhaal’s script was like “being plugged into an electrical current” and that she loves Gyllenhaal to the point that she would’ve played a “sheep” in one of her movies if she asked.

“I would describe it as the punkest love that’s ever existed,” Buckley said. “It’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Wild at Heart’ and all those characters, but I think ours has some petrol in its skin and we’re holding a match.”

“The Bride” was also shot in IMAX, and Gyllenhaal said she became a “total convert” to using it and got nerdy about the different aspect ratios and how they became integral to the movie.

The official logline reads: “A lonely Frankenstein travels to 1930s Chicago to seek the aide of a Dr. Euphronius in creating a companion for himself. The two reinvigorate a murdered young woman and the Bride is born. She is beyond what either of them intended, igniting a combustible romance, the attention of the police and a wild and radical social movement.”

This is just Gyllenhaal’s second feature after “The Lost Daughter,” the Netflix feature starring Olivia Colman that was made for a much smaller budget on a more modest scale. This film represents a big swing for Warner Bros. and film chiefs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy as there have been reports about added scrutiny about their spending, especially in the wake of another pricy and ambitious musical, “Joker: Folie a Deux.”

“The Bride” opens in theaters via Warner Bros. Pictures on March 6, 2026.