Is Bridget Jones still relevant in the 2020s?

Dating scene and relationship power dynamics have changed since heroine's heyday

Bridget Jones
Renée Zellweger stars in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, the second film of the series, made in 2004
(Image credit: Laurie Sparham/Universal/Studio Canal / Miramax / Kobal / Shutterstock)

Bridget Jones is returning to the big screen, 23 years after Helen Fielding's heroine first burst into our lives with her chardonnay and oversized granny pants.

The fourth movie in the saga will be based on Fielding's 2013 novel "Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy", which saw her raising young children as a single mum while "navigating social media and dating apps", said the Mail on Sunday.

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'Please no more'

Jones "harks back to a time where thinness equated cultural capital and success", said Kimberley Bond in Cosmopolitan. Although one of the film's writers, Richard Curtis, has since apologised for the "rampant fatphobia", this "doesn't unpick the damage that has been sewn into our collective psyche that a certain weight is fat".

Her "dating life" is "unrecognisable" to women today, wrote Lauren O'Neill in Vogue. Dating apps and an "evolved understanding about power dynamics at work" mean the ways women meet men have changed significantly. House prices mean that single women have gone from "living depressingly alone" to "never living alone".

"Oh God, please, no," said Emily Maddick in Glamour. "If we've learned anything from trying to resurrect beloved single icons such as Carrie Bradshaw 20 years on from their original early noughties playground, it just doesn't work".

She cited the "Sex and the City" spin-off "And Just Like That", which tried to "shove characters that were ground-breaking and brilliant in their time into the modern landscape".

'Wonders for motherhood'

Enthusiasm for a fourth Jones chapter is thin on the ground but Rebecca Reid, on the i news site, hopes the character can "do for motherhood what it did for being a thirtysomething". She recalls how Fielding's creation "rewrote our perception of being single in your thirties" because Jones "found joy in it". Reid is "quietly, tentatively hopeful" that the fourth film "might be able to perform that same make-over for the perception of having kids".

Jones was "anachronistic from the start", wrote Kevin Maher in The Times. "Return if you want," he said, "but not as you are." He suggested that Jones could "re-emerge with a post-MeToo legal case against Daniel Cleaver", "or maybe Darcy should take out a restraining order?" Alternatively, Jones could: "Go gay! Go trans! Date an AI sexbot!"

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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.