In the run-up to opening weekend, we were not tracking well at all at the box office.
Bridesmaids movie movie#
I always said when making the movie, "This is strike three for me." If I didn't deliver on that movie, they were never going to let me do anything ever again.Īlso, because we were known as the all-women comedy, the word around town was like, "If this doesn't work, we're never making a movie like this again." It was terrifying all the way up to the movie's opening day. The box-office success, the Oscar nominations for Kristen and Annie's script and for Melissa's performance - what was it like riding that wave? The movie became a game changer in female comedy after opening on May 13, 2011. Because in movies like this, female friendship hadn't been explored this way before.įeig and McCarthy drove to a movie theater on opening night when they realized 'Bridesmaids' was going to be a box-office hit I'm just so glad we did that change because it really brought it all together and created this lovely friendship between the Megan and Annie characters. That was all stuff she came up with when we shot on the day. She added in the stuff like how rich she is, having the clearance codes, firecrackers thrown at her head. And then she took what we had on the page and ran with it. Once we cast Melissa, we were like, "Why are we throwing this part away to a character we don't know?" So we rewrote it so that Megan comes over.
This character, a woman in Mumbai at a call center, would always call, and Annie would always have some funny way to get out of talking to her.īut for this scene, after everything falls apart for Annie, she gets the call from the woman who then gets serious and says, "Don't you dare hang up on me!" And she reads her the riot act on her life. So originally, there was a collection-agency character who would call Annie all the time because she was spending so much money. It's a tone changer, but it also shows Melissa's versatility as an actress. Melissa McCarthy ad-libbed most of the scene in which Megan talks about being bullied in high schoolĪ scene that really sticks out for me is when Megan shows up at Annie's home and talks about being bullied. Melissa McCarthy's line about firecrackers being thrown at her head in high school was made up on the spot. It's this romance feel with her running through the woods and Matt Damon is shirtless chopping wood. Annie goes in the dressing room to try on this really expensive dress, and suddenly she has a fantasy of what her life could be in this dress. That just got cut because we had too much movie.Īfter that, we go into the dress shop. We shot it at a Macy's in the middle of the night. So we had this bit about tiny shrimp forks. Annie is picking out cheap stuff that she thinks Lillian will like, and Helen is picking out shrimp forks. Originally there was a scene between the restaurant and the dress shop where they go shopping for wedding gifts. But originally, they don't get food poisoning, right? The women going to the dress fitting after having lunch - that's one of the most memorable scenes in the movie.
In the original script, the dress-shopping scene features Annie having a fantasy about Matt Damon chopping wood - not the food-poisoning debacle The food-poisoning scene came about to create a consequence to Annie's actions. He also shed light on the reason we'll likely never get a sequel.
Speaking with Insider, Feig looked back on the evolution of the movie's most memorable scenes and revealed the recognizable stars who were in the running during casting. "Five minutes later, Judd called me up and I suddenly had the job after being in movie jail for a while." "I went back to my hotel one night and I got a call from my agent that the wedding movie is alive again," he said.
His lowest point, he said, was doing a Macy's ad that starred Donald Trump. Meanwhile, Feig was "bummed out" that his movie career had stalled - instead busying himself by directing commercials. It would take four years until he got another call from Apatow. "After the table read, I would check in, and finally, a couple years later Judd told me, 'I think it's dead.'" "And it wasn't even the cast we ended up with, although Melissa McCarthy was part of that read. "I went to it, and the bones were there, but it was a lot different from what ended up onscreen," he said.