A husband woven to order opened to $5.75 million, and critics ask what he sees in her

Olivia Colman's fisherwoman asks a basket weaver for a husband, and gets one made of wicker. Wicker, the fable built on that request, opened to an estimated $5.75 million from 1,471 theaters in the United States and Canada over the weekend of October 23 to 25, 2026, finishing fifth.

A small release that held its own

The film is a Sundance pickup, and its numbers are modest beside the weekend's winners. Deadline's weekend chart puts it at No. 5, with a Friday of $2.36 million (previews included), a Saturday of $1.8 million and a Sunday of $1.55 million. Clayface took first place.

Screen Rant, citing Box Office Mojo, reports a per-theater average of $3,908. That figure put Wicker above bigger releases on more screens: Other Mommy made $3.85 million in 2,798 theaters, and Sense and Sensibility made $3.4 million in 2,571.

The comparison cuts both ways. The Wikipedia entry for the film says it was projected to gross $6 to 8 million from those 1,471 theaters, so it landed under the forecast, at $5.7 million in that account. A strong week for a small film is not the same as a hit, and nobody in the coverage says it is one.

The money behind it is small too. Boxoffice Pro and the Associated Press, as relayed by the wire service Kinolime, say Black Bear Pictures bought the film out of Sundance for $2.5 million. Screen Rant gives a reported production budget of $10 million, so one weekend recovered more than half of it, by the site's own arithmetic. The site adds that the exact break-even point is unknown and guesses it sits below $25 million.

Collider, for its part, called the film the success story of the weekend that no one is talking about. Its own competition that weekend was heavy: Street Fighter lost 72% of its opening audience in its second weekend, and the documentary You Can See Everything grew.

The husband who wants only her happiness

The premise comes from "The Wicker Husband," a short story by Ursula Wills, adapted by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, who also direct. The film premiered at Sundance on January 24, 2026, and closed the Sitges Film Festival on October 18. Colman is also a producer. Wikipedia notes that Dev Patel was first attached to the husband's role before Alexander Skarsgård took it.

In a village where nobody has a name, only a trade, Colman plays the Fisherwoman, lonely, mocked and ignored for the smell of her catch. She walks to the Basket Weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, and says: "I want you to make me a husband." The Globe and Mail's Barry Hertz, in a review published on October 21, calls the result an "intensely adult" fairy tale and spends most of his praise on Colman's swearing.

Deadline's chief film critic, Pete Hammond, writing on October 22, describes the husband as "a dream version of the perfect husband, one who professes he wants only what will make his new wife happy." He finds Skarsgård's performance makes the wicker man "undeniably more human" than the men who were born rather than woven.

The village notices. Matt Oakes of Silver Screen Riot, who grades the film a B, writes that the Fisherwoman blossoms: nicer clothes, hair done, a wash before she leaves the house. The wives want their own wicker husbands, and the husbands want to be looked at the way she looks at hers.

The Tailor's Wife, played by Elizabeth Debicki, is the one who cannot stand it. Hammond says she sets out to convince the Fisherwoman that her divine husband is unfaithful, and the plot turns on jealousy and suspicion that curdle as the husband connects with other people in town. The effect is practical rather than digital: Silver Screen Riot credits a full-body suit designed by Joe Dunckley and Wētā Workshop, with Skarsgård's own eyes and movements visible through the weave, and calls the husband a marvel. Oakes also notes that no one in the village questions the existence of a wicker husband or the practicality of one, and that the film never mentions witchcraft. A husband arrives, and the village only wishes it had one too, which is the film's driest joke and perhaps its truest observation about envy.

It is a tender idea, and a very old one: that love is a thing you can commission, and that what you commissioned will arrive already devoted. The film turns it into a comedy of envy, and then, in the critics' telling, into something less comfortable.

Where the critics push back

The praise is wide, the reservations are specific. Collider's Therese Lacson, reviewing the film after its festival debut, called it "a fun and quirky story about love and overcoming loneliness." That is the film most of the audience seems to have bought a ticket for. Oakes puts the problem plainly. By his account, "the film never provides great insight into what he sees in her beyond the fact that he was made to do just that." The Basket Weaver insists the husband learned his love from her, and Oakes finds that explanation as thin as the reeds.

He goes further and asks whether devotion of this kind is subservience. The film's idea of the perfect partner, he writes, is one who loves blindly, never asks questions, fixes everything and tends the home, and it "plays less like a probing inquiry than a gender-flipped wish-fulfillment fantasy with a faintly preachy streak."

Hertz makes a related point from another angle. His verdict on the husband is that Skarsgård's village stud is "more of a metaphor than a character," and that the film is not meant to be taken too seriously.

So the same film is read as a satire of marriages in which men take their wives for granted (Hammond's reading) and as a fantasy that does not question its own wish (Oakes's). Both critics liked it. Rotten Tomatoes scores of 93% and 94% are reported for critics and audiences, though Deadline and Screen Rant give the two figures in opposite order.

The wish has a modern cousin. A partner who never pushes back is also the promise of the agreeable chatbot, a pattern one of our own essays on machines that never say no examines.

What people say they want, and who they like in the room

A made-to-order husband rests on a bet: that you can specify in advance who you will love. Psychology has tested a version of that bet, and the results are not kind to the specification.

Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel of Northwestern University ran speed-dating events in which participants first rated how much they valued traits such as looks and earning prospects in an ideal partner, then met real people for four minutes each. According to a summary on the research blog Tenr, in their 2008 study the stated preferences failed to predict which real people participants wanted afterward. The familiar gap in what men and women say they value also vanished in the live data.

The same summary reports an earlier study of professional speed-dating events, with participants averaging 32 years old, in which income did not make either men or women significantly more desirable to partners, though earning prospects rank high on paper. Another of our briefs covers a related finding on algorithms and attraction.

The limits are plain. We could not open the 2008 paper itself, so the account rests on the blog's reading of it, and a four-minute meeting is not a marriage. The studies say nothing about how attachment grows after the first meeting; they say only that people are poor judges, in advance, of whom they will like when someone sits down across from them.

The Fisherwoman's husband skips that part. He is specified, delivered and devoted before she has had to learn anything about him, which is why the critics' question, what he sees in her, has no answer inside the film.

The dates ahead

Boxoffice Pro, as relayed by Kinolime, says the film expands in the United States the weekend after its opening. Wikipedia lists the United Kingdom release for October 30, 2026, handled by Black Bear, which also sells the film internationally.

Screen Rant expects international markets to add to the total in the coming weeks and argues that the strong reviews should help word of mouth. Deadline's chart carries the same sort of hope: it calls the start a great one for Black Bear and describes the film as an upscale female movie.

For now the count stands at $5.75 million, nine months after the Sundance premiere and one weekend into a release that Black Bear promised would be meaningful.