@rockmarooned Published March 10, 2026, 8:30 a.m. ET Where to Stream: Norbit Powered by Reelgood More On: Oscars 2026 ‘Stand By Me’ Star Corey Feldman Claims He “Was Not Invited” To The Oscars’ Rob Reiner Tribute: “I’ll Honor Rob My Own Way” Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Nuremberg’ on Netflix, a Dutiful Historical Drama About a Sociopath and the Shrink Who Cracks Him Open When Are The Oscars? Start Time, Channel, Oscars 2026 Streaming Info ‘Hamnet’ Ending Explained: The Meaning Behind the Jessie Buckley Shakespeare Movie Jessie Buckley is heavily favored to win the Academy Award for Best Actress this weekend for her wrenching performance in the grief drama Hamnet. Her Oscar profile seemed like a boon to her latest movie: the big-budget horror drama The Bride!, written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who directed Buckley to her previous nomination for 2021’s The Lost Daughter. Instead, the movie is a box office bomb – it may well gross less than Hamnet when all is said and done – and set off a flurry of comparisons to, of all things, the 2007 Eddie Murphy vehicle Norbit.
The thinking goes that when Murphy was considered a strong contender to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 2006’s Dreamgirls, his chances were at least partially scuttled by the voting-season release of Norbit, which isn’t just one of his comedies, but a particularly broad and vulgar one where he plays the triple role of henpecked dork Norbit, his overweight and abusive girlfriend Rasputia, and a Chinese orphanage proprietor. Unlike Bowfinger, a dual-Murphy movie with performances so virtuosic that it (at least in retrospect) sparked conversations about whether comedy could ever be afforded the proper awards-season respect, Norbit got terrible reviews – and in what may have been seen as a worst-of-both-worlds scenario, was also a high-visibility hit. (It made more money than Bowfinger and almost as much as Dreamgirls.)
Murphy lost that Oscar, to Little Miss Sunshine’s Alan Arkin, in a role that had been considerably less hyped than Murphy’s first “serious” movie in ages (and first-ever Oscar nomination). Conventional wisdom quickly took hold: It was Norbit! Norbit blew up the mercurial Murphy’s awards chances! And ever since, like that old anime meme of the guy looking at a butterfly, would-be pundits and smartasses have looked at almost any less-than-awards-caliber performance from an Oscar nominee released in January, February, or March and asked: Is this Norbit?
Performers vaguely accused of Norbit-ing in the years since include Anne Hathaway (for having Bride Wars in theaters as she received a nomination for Rachel Getting Married; admittedly, this is a gruesome thematic contrast of wedding-related cinema); Natalie Portman (for having mainstream hit No Strings Attached hit while she was campaigning for Black Swan, which won her the Oscar in 2011); Nicole Kidman the same year as Portman (Kidman had a small role in Just Go With It, an Adam Sandler comedy not lightyears away from Norbit in crudeness, as she was nominated for Rabbit Hole). In 2015, the Daily Beast asked whether Julianne Moore (Still Alice/Seventh Son) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything/Jupiter Ascending) were both at risk, prior to both of them winning. Entertainment Weekly even evaluated whether some pre-Norbit movies had actually been Norbit before Norbit.
The historical analysis concluded little, and none of those post-2007 movies had any discernible effect on the race, either. Portman won, which meant that Kidman couldn’t (and wasn’t ever expected to). Hathaway was never really a frontrunner for Rachel, even if she should have been; that was the year Kate Winslet was considered overdue, and Hathaway’s nomination was the real reward. Interesting, though, to see how often these supposed career-wreckers, including Buckley’s over-the-top turn in The Bride!, come from women, even though the idea originates with Murphy. The initial contrast between a star’s commercial career and his more prestigious ambitions has been recast as concern-trolling about women’s dignity and decorum in the face of recognition. Oh, my: Can she really be rewarded for acting like that? That is usually either silly or, by implication, money-grubbing for lowering herself to the kinds of commercial vehicles that virtually ever actor must take on occasion.
The Bride! obviously isn’t a nakedly commercial play – Warner Bros. is probably wishing it had been – but it certainly brings up questions of decorum. It’s specifically well-positioned to capitalize on the usual awards-season grumbling about a frontrunner, in this case that she’s simply doing too much in Hamnet: Too much emoting, too much painful wailing, too much affecting confusion and disorientation when her character, the wife of William Shakespeare, sees a production of his play Hamlet for the first time. (It seems to be true, though, that the real Mrs. Shakespeare had relatively little interest in her husband’s work, and in any event, this fictional movie character certainly isn’t a seasoned theatergoer.)
The Bride! specifically doubles down on that muchness: Buckley plays a ’30s moll who is possessed by the spirit of Mary Shelley (!), killed, and then resurrected in a daze of feminist fury, giving her the freedom to dance, shout, and speak in multiple accents. It’s a lot, and it’s also perfect for any Hamnet haters: See! Vindication! She’s too much! Too much-ness is also the subject and style of The Bride!; Gyllenhaal very much aims for something well over the top, and happily affronts good taste, decency, etc., in a particularly middle-aged-feminist way that will make plenty of people cringe. Buckley, with her theater-kid energy, never flinches. She gives exactly the kind of performance this material demands, for better or worse.
The same could be said of Norbit, for that matter. Murphy co-wrote that film with his late brother Charlie, and it’s very much in the vein of his Nutty Professor-era makeup-assisted shapeshifting. Murphy has held fast that he still enjoys Norbit and finds it funny, and simply doesn’t agree that it’s one of his worst movies ever – a refreshing change from the 21st century trend of actors gaining press-tour cred by throwing this or that movie under the bus on demand.
Moreover, when all is said and done, it’s pretty unlikely that Norbit cost Murphy “his” Oscar – or at least, not specifically Norbit so much as racist unspoken demands placed on a Black performer, even or especially one as popular as Murphy. (He gets into this in a particularly funny scene from, you guessed it, Bowfinger, with his paranoid superstar character ranting about just what it takes for a white guy to get an Oscar while Black actors tend to be rewarded for playing slaves; the language is difficult to repeat in 2026, but it climaxes with him sarcastically ordering his agent to find him a part as “Buck, the Wonder Slave.”) Maybe Norbit gave Oscar voters all the excuse they needed to go with the old white guy instead. It’s also possible that the visibility of a crude hit like Norbit did exacerbate some industry annoyance with Murphy, who has been described as a sometimes-difficult figure to work with. Or maybe voters found it especially “difficult” that Murphy bravely called out the Academy for their lack of diversity at the 1988 Oscars – while presenting Best Picture, no less! There’s also the possibility that Dreamgirls itself never had the awards juice everyone assumed it did. This was, after all, a movie some folks thought might win Best Picture… before it failed to be nominated in that category at all.
More likely, it was all of that stuff rolled together, not Norbit in particular, that denied Murphy a win. On a purely technical level, Oscar voting closed before The Bride! was actually in theaters, so while some Academy voters may have seen it beforehand, the likelihood that it could affect Buckley’s chances is close to nil. This might not be the last time The Bride! is mentioned in conjunction with the big awards, though. Whatever you think of the film, its makeup, costume design, and art direction is pretty terrific work from some heavy-hitters in the industry. And a year after Murphy lost the Oscar, Norbit was back: It was nominated for a Best Makeup Oscar in 2008. Maybe Norbit-ing is just the realization that Oscars are not necessarily always where you’re looking for them.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Guardian, among others.
