Bridget Jones is coming back into our lives next February, and we even have the first trailer for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy to prove it.
It will have been more than eight years since Bridget Jones's Baby when we reunite with Bridget. We already know that the new movie takes place four years after the death of Mark Darcy, but this isn't the only change we should expect.
Talking at a trailer preview event in London yesterday (November 11), director Michael Morris explained that while he didn't want to "remake Bridget" for the new movie, he did want to do something new with the iconic character.
"Bridget is this beautiful thing that has existed for years, so this was about making a Bridget for now, reimagining what Bridget is now," he continued.
Related: All you need to know about Bridget Jones 4
"Back at the beginning, Bridget was a 30-something singleton living in London, having that experience that 30-something people over the very beginning of their 30s had then. Then there were two other films that sort of revisited her. She was in the same place. She was largely with the same friends, in the same job.
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"The opportunity here was to discover Bridget now as she is today. It's the first time Bridget has lived somewhere different, different part of London, different place. It's the first time that she has a family. It's the first time that she's in a very different place in her life.
"To me as a director, that was an opportunity to make a different version of Bridget, a style of Bridget that perhaps we hadn't seen before, a way of looking at her and hopefully of London that you wouldn't have seen in the Bridget films. I love the Bridget films, obviously, but this is a new time."
When it came to the new movie, Morris added that he wanted to make a "comedy of grief" that tackles what you do when you've been "one half of one of the great love stories" that has now ended.
Related: Bridget Jones trilogy is back on Netflix
"You thought your life was charting its course. You'd gone through all the hard parts and they were really funny, and now you've got there. What do you do when that plan suddenly changes or has suddenly changed?," he explained.
"[It's] very much a comedy, very much celebrating life in all the joyfulness that Bridget brings, but life, you can't ignore the hard bits, you just can't. It's going to happen to everybody, so how does Bridget deal with it?
"How do you attack moving on essentially with the kind of Bridget verve and joyfulness? And I think in that way this is a rom-com, but a real-life rom-com is what I wanted to make."
It certainly fits with what Hugh Grant has been teasing about the new movie being "very, very sad" and also "extremely funny".
We've just got a few more months to wait to find out exactly how sad it'll make us.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy will be released in UK cinemas on February 14. It will be released exclusively on Peacock in the US on February 13.
Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.
