It isn’t fair for one movie starring all women to set the standard for all future movies starring women. But that’s how Bridesmaids director Paul Feig said he was made to feel in the weeks and months leading up to the gross-out comedy’s 2011 release.

“How much did the success of Bridesmaids mean to you?” Jesse Tyler Ferguson asked Feig on a recent episode of the Dinner’s On Me podcast. “Everything,” Feig answered. “It was everything.”

On top of the film being “predicted to not do well right up until the day of release,” Feig recalled being “told for months, ‘Another movie starring women all hinges on the success of this.’ And it’s like, ‘Really? So I’m just about to kill movies for women.’ So I was walking around like dead man walking all day, like, ‘We failed, we failed, we failed.'” 

The 2011 comedy, about a bride’s messy best friend whose antics threaten to upend the wedding, was written by Annie Mumulo and Kristen Wiig, and starred Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, and more. Though Feig “knew we were getting really funny stuff” while shooting the film, he reasoned that “nobody sets out to make a bad movie. And nobody thinks they’re making a bad movie either.”

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“We were told, if this movie doesn’t make $20 million opening weekend, it will be considered a failure,” he continued. The budget for Bridesmaids was $32.5 million. Though it included big names like Wiig and Rudolph, it isn’t generally expected for comedies to rake in triple, double, or even more than half their budgets in the same way it’s expected of horror films or superhero films.

To make matters worse, the studio showed “a preview the night before, and it didn’t do well in the midnight screening. So this call comes in the next morning, and they’re like, ‘Well, the projections are $13 million for the weekend.’ I’m like, ‘Sorry, man.'”

It seemed just about over for Feig, who called McCarthy and her husband, comedian Ben Falcone the night of the release. “It’s like, ‘Come over, we’ll have dinner, and we’ll just kind of lick our wounds together.’  And as we’re at dinner, I’m getting these texts. They’re like, ‘It’s looking like $18 million. Well, it’s looking like $19 million. Actually 21.’ What? And then suddenly it’s going like 22, 23, 24.”

“I’m like, ‘Get in the car everybody! And so we all — Ben, Melissa and Lori, my wife and I — all jumped in the car and drove to the ArcLight in Hollywood and walked into this theater, and it was packed and rocking,” he continued. “And it was just like, ‘We did it!’ And it was just — oh, it was such a validation —for so many years of wanting this and being denied it, and having two movies who bombed so horribly.”

Bridesmaids went on to earn $26 million in its opening weekend. By the end of its first week in theaters, it had grossed $44 million. The film remained in theaters for a stunning five months, ultimately grossing over $169 million at the domestic box office and $288 million combined with international markets.

The film netted McCarthy a Best Supporting Actress nod at the Oscars, and Wiig and Mumulo a nomination for their screenplay. As for Feig, it broke him out of what he describes as “movie jail,” which Warner Bros. locked him in after his film Unaccompanied Minors bombed. Feig credits Bridesmaids producer Judd Apatow above all for busting him out by “giving me that chance” to direct.

In a 2019 oral history of the film for Entertainment Weekly, Rudolph commented that, “By that point, I’d been so trained for disappointment in comedy that…it just didn’t occur to me that it would actually be a hit.” The success of Bridesmaids was fantastic for its director, writers, and the film’s whole cast. But to Rudolph, “the feeling was we were all laughing at each other and we were all supporting each other. That’s kind of all that mattered.”