Renee Zellweger ‘Has Kept the Flame Alive’ on ‘Bridget Jones’: No. 4 to Make Her ‘Tom Cruise’ Money

Renée Zellweger likes to live life on the down low these days, but she’s coming out of her self-imposed hibernation to plug the upcoming Bridget Jones installment – Mad About The Boy – for all its worth. It also doesn’t hurt that the actress is looking at the huge carrot of a massive payday bonus if the movie does well at the box office, a source exclusively reveals to Closer. 

“Over the decades, Renée has kept the flame alive on the Bridget Jones film franchise and with good reason: these are the films that made her rich and kept her rich even when she opted to not act at all for years at a time,” the insider says. 

The first Bridget Jones flick, Bridget Jones’s Diary, became a smash hit when it was released in 2001, racking up $280 million at the box office against a relatively small budget of about $25 million. Essential to its triumph was the charisma and performance of Renée, 55, who expertly portrayed a girl many felt they could relate to. 

Based on a series of novels, execs were quick to capitalize on the success of the movie by continuing the story according to the source material – for the most part. That led to the second movie, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, which released in November 2004. There was a gap as execs considered whether or not to relaunch the series, but eventually decided to resuscitate the title, resulting in Bridget Jones’s Baby in 2016.

As the fourth installment is gearing up for release in time for Valentine’s Day in 2025, the source notes that Renée has deftly managed to secure “real profit participation points on the back end of these movies,” mostly through developing “a rock-solid relationship with her fellow producers and with the creator of the franchise, the author Helen Fielding.” 

“The upside of all of that is how smoothly this fourth movie came together,” the source continues. “You almost never see a fourth movie in a successful series get up and running like this, and that’s down to Renée’s creative leadership and continued relevance.” 

“Renée has fully earned the total control she has over these films.” 

However, the insider points out that there is a “downside for Renée and her team, who have been with her on these movies for twenty years now,” which is that “the promotion of these movies is entirely on her shoulders and it all comes down to how many interviews she can do, how many red carpets she can walk and how much unpaid media she can generate.” 

For Renée, who has built up an impressive estimated net worth of $90 million, the labor seems to be worth it for the series that brought home the bacon for so many decades.

Still, “It’s a challenge for a person who is naturally shy like Renée, but at the end of that long road is a payoff on par with what guys like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt can earn on one of their hit movies!”