Is Bridget Jones still relevant in the 2020s?

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.

But some have questioned whether the rom-com heroine, who emerged on the page in the 1990s and reached the cinemas in 2001, can remain relevant in the vastly changed landscape of the 2020s.

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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!"