Brooke Shields has made a comeback with the lead role in the Netflix romantic comedy Mother of the Bride, but the new movie has unfortunately set an unwanted Rotten Tomatoes record for the actor’s career. Mother of the Bride stars Shields as a single mother and Miranda Cosgrove as her daughter who returns from a year abroad with the news that she’s getting married in a month. Much to her mom’s horror, the father of the groom is her own ex-boyfriend from college, played by Benjamin Bratt.
Shields first became a star as a teen actor in the 1980s with roles in The Blue Lagoon and Endless Love. Throughout her decades-long career, Shields has appeared in some widely acclaimed films, from Freeway to Chalet Girl to Alice, Sweet Alice. She had memorable cameo appearances in The Other Guys and The Muppets Take Manhattan. Now, she’s leading the Mother of the Bride cast. Based on its trailer, Mother of the Bride looked like it could be a crowd-pleasing feel-good romcom, but its dismal Rotten Tomatoes score tells a different story.
When the first reviews for Mother of the Bride came in, it debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0% rating, indicating a universally negative reception. Not only is 0% a “rotten” score, which is already bad; it means that not a single review for Mother of the Bride was even remotely positive. This is a new low for Shields’ career – she’s never had a movie land 0% on Rotten Tomatoes before. Even the most critically panned ones got at least a couple of positive reviews.
Her previous lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes was 8%, shared by 1999’s The Bachelor and 2010’s Furry Vengeance. The Bachelor is a remake of Buster Keaton’s 1925 silent comedy Seven Chances. Furry Vengeance is a family-friendly slapstick comedy about a real estate developer whose life is ruined by pesky wildlife who want revenge for his new project tearing down their woodland home. According to Rotten Tomatoes, Mother of the Bride is even worse than these.
The main reason why Mother of the Bride’s reviews are so negative is that it’s not the kind of movie that’s made to please critics. It’s made for fans of romantic comedy movies and it delivers the goods in that genre. It sticks to the familiar romcom formula with a silly high-concept premise and the promise of both comical situations and rekindled romance. Critics might have hated Mother of the Bride, but its target audience will be charmed by it.