Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas Skips the Holiday and Waits for November

Pedro Almodóvar’s Bitter Christmas has taken $6,078,501 worldwide without a Christmas-week opening, and U.S. theaters get it on November 13.

Spain got the film on March 20. Cannes got it on May 19. Britain got it on August 28. The title promised December. The bookings never did.

The Christmas Movie That Missed Christmas

On March 20, Warner Bros. Pictures opened Amarga Navidad, the Spanish title, in Spanish cinemas. Pathé put the same film into French theaters on May 20 under another name, Autofiction. Curzon took Britain and Ireland. Sony Pictures Classics has the United States. None of those dates sit inside the holiday the poster names.

The March slot follows an old Almodóvar habit of letting Spain see a film before Cannes, as Volver did. The calendar is industrial. The joke is still the title. A Christmas movie about grief, migraines and a director who cannot stop writing played through spring, summer and early autumn, and it will reach American screens in mid-November, closer to Thanksgiving than to any nativity scene.

This is his 24th feature in 46 years, made at 76 for El Deseo, the company he runs with his brother Agustín Almodóvar. Shooting ran from June 9 to August 12, 2025, in Madrid and on Lanzarote, the volcanic island he had already used in Broken Embraces. Movistar Plus+ backed the production. Alberto Iglesias wrote the score. Pau Esteve Birba shot it. Teresa Font cut it.

THE FILM ON PAPER

• Length: The Spanish ministry lists a 111-minute Spanish tragicomedy in Spanish with English subtitles.
• Certificates: Britain gave it a 15. The United States gave it an R for sexual material and language.
• Cannes medal: It left the 79th festival with the Cannes Soundtrack Award for Iglesias, shared with Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, not with the Palme d’Or.

The English title shares a name with a Chavela Vargas song. Inside the 2004 strand, Amaia Romero appears as herself and sings Vargas for Bárbara Lennie’s Elsa until Elsa weeps. That is as close as the movie comes to a carol.

Elsa Writes, Then Raúl Rewrites Her

Sony’s own synopsis splits the story in two. In 2004, during a long December weekend around Spain’s Constitution Day, Elsa, an advertising director, works through her mother’s death until a panic attack stops her. Her partner Bonifacio, a firefighter who also strips, stays in Madrid. Her friend Patricia goes with her to Lanzarote. In 2026, a celebrated filmmaker named Raúl writes a script that is Elsa’s story, and Elsa is his stand-in.

Lennie, who had a small part in The Skin I Live In in 2011, plays Elsa in her first major Almodóvar role. Leonardo Sbaraglia, who already passed through Pain and Glory, plays Raúl. Aitana Sánchez-Gijón is Mónica, the assistant who has kept his life in order. Victoria Luengo is Patricia. Patrick Criado is Bonifacio. Milena Smit, back after Parallel Mothers, is Natalia, a friend hollowed out by the death of her young son. Quim Gutiérrez is Santi, Raúl’s boyfriend. Carmen Machi, Gloria Muñoz and Rossy de Palma fill the edges.

The 2004 strand is already a film about making a film. On Lanzarote, Elsa starts a script about two grieving women and borrows Patricia’s marriage without asking enough. Patricia leaves. Natalia arrives, sees a boy who looks like her dead son, and tries to die. Elsa gets her to a hospital. Then the frame snaps shut: Raúl has been typing all of this, and Mónica recognizes the private wreckage of people she loves.

A line from the British trailer states the charge the rest of the movie has to answer. “You need to enjoy things more. Go out, live! Not everything is about writing and making films.”

THREE LAYERS OF THE SAME MAN

• Elsa in 2004: A woman director turns friends’ grief into pages and calls it work.
• Raúl in 2026: A man director writes Elsa as his alter ego, then pushes the draft until Mónica threatens to expose him.
• Almodóvar on top: He writes Raúl writing Elsa, and has said this is the film in which he has been cruelest with himself.

Raúl’s first draft is called Bitter Christmas. After Mónica walks out, he starts another, Dulce Elsa, Sweet Elsa, with the woman on the page now modeled on the assistant he just lost. Santi asks how Bonifacio’s story ends. Raúl says he will know only if he is allowed to write without interruption. The movie lets that request hang.

Alberto Iglesias Left Cannes With a Gold Record

The film had its international premiere in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival on May 19, the only non-world-premiere in that slate, a courtesy Cannes has extended to Almodóvar before. It did not take the Palme d’Or. On May 23 a jury of 12 French-speaking film journalists gave Iglesias the Cannes Soundtrack Award, a gold record on Miramar Beach, his second after Pain and Glory in 2019.

First-wave notices split in a way a June trailer recap could honestly call mixed. Some praised the film for laying the director bare. Others wanted more feeling than the concept delivered. Rotten Tomatoes later settled at 89% positive from 63 critics, with an average of 7.3 out of 10, and a consensus that leans on nested storytelling and comic rhythm. Metacritic, weighting a smaller pile, has 69 out of 100 from 22 critics, which it files as generally favorable. Those two systems are not the same temperature, and they should not be mashed into one verdict.

WHERE THE FIRST NOTICES SPLIT

• The honesty: Early Spanish notices talked about brutal candor and a structure that folds on itself, with star ratings of four and four and a half out of five from magazine critics who saw a self-portrait.
• The chill: Other first viewers said the craft was there and the emotional hit was not, a complaint that followed the film from Cannes into some British write-ups.
• The pan: Spanish critic Carlos Boyero said, “No me interesa lo más mínimo. Son dos horas de tedio.”

That last line is the cleanest version of the case against the movie: two hours of tedium from a director who used to set rooms on fire. The case for it lives in the last stretch, when Raúl’s theft of a suicide and Mónica’s revolt finally force the film to pick a side. Several British notices that otherwise stayed cool conceded that ending. The argument is less whether Almodóvar can still compose a shot than whether this particular confession earns its length.

A Stronger Spanish Opening Than His Last Two

Spain’s first weekend brought $832,264 and 96,852 admissions, a slightly stronger start than Parallel Mothers and The Room Next Door, the two features that immediately preceded this one. The Room Next Door had won the Golden Lion in Venice and was his first English-language feature. Bitter Christmas is the return to Spanish, and Spanish tickets responded.

Before that opening, a clip of Almodóvar talking about U.S. promotion ricocheted through Spanish timelines, and accounts that already disliked him bet the movie would die at the box office. The first weekend did not die. It also did not become a popular smash. It did what late Almodóvar does in Spain: it opened as an event and then lived as a respectable adult drama.

WHERE THE MONEY LANDED

Box Office Mojo’s worldwide total of $6,078,501 is all international. There is no domestic U.S. figure yet. Spain, Italy and France together account for $5,657,339, or 93% of that global take. Spain alone is about half. The British number is an opening that, in the same tally, has not grown, which is how a specialist title looks when the tracker stops adding weeks.

The Line He Will Not Cross

Almodóvar has been walking this corridor since Pain and Glory, when Antonio Banderas played a director who looked and sounded like him. Sbaraglia now carries that job, silver hair included. Elsa carries it too, which is the new wrinkle: the proxy is split across a woman in 2004 and a man at a desk in 2026, and both of them live off other people’s pain.

This is a film in which I really expose myself a lot. I have always been attracted to the very mysterious relationship between reality and creation. I didn’t want to pull back in being critical of myself and my own creative process.

Pedro Almodóvar, director

He has said the Elsa and Bonifacio pairing draws on a relationship from the early 2000s, when migraines were old company and panic attacks were new, and a boyfriend got him through the first ruined weekend. He will not say what Bonifacio feels once Elsa leaves for Lanzarote. He likes that silence. He also states a rule he knows autofiction does not enforce.

“The line for me is that I don’t want to harm the people that I use for inspiration. So far, I think I have succeeded.” A few beats later he adds the other half of the thought: when writers work from the lives nearest them, “you have to think that writers are always going to be selfish.” Once the story arrives, they do not let it go.

That is the plot of the Mónica scenes. She takes a sabbatical to care for a former lover whose child has cancer. Raúl keeps typing. The child dies. He writes a suicide onto Natalia that Mónica reads as Elena’s. She storms his house, tells him he has not had an original idea in years, and says not all suffering is ripe for filming. He looks at her as if he has only just seen her, and then he starts a new draft in her image. The movie is a confession that also commits the crime it confesses, which is the sour joke inside the title.

He is blunter about why the work continues. “For me, the very fact of making films is the psychological support.” And, on why this kind of film arrives so late: “You lose the fear of exposing your intimacy.”

What Curzon Opened in Late August

Curzon’s UK and Ireland cinema release was August 28, with a 15 certificate and a drama label. The British gross in the Mojo table is $219,971. That is a specialist opening, not a breakout, and it matches a film whose concerns are insular even by Almodóvar standards: a Spanish director, writing in Spanish, about the ethics of a Spanish director’s notebook.

British notices that liked it treated the movie as a candid account of self-doubt and craft, and pointed out that the title’s bitterness is mostly conceptual. Notices that did not like it found a lighter, more elusive object than Pain and Glory, with Lennie boxed into a part that never quite explodes the way a Penélope Cruz role does in this filmography. Both readings can be true at once. The camera is still wet with primary color. The structure is still a toy. The question is whether you want to watch a man at a typewriter punish himself for 111 minutes.

Lennie is the draw for anyone who has been waiting for Almodóvar to write her a real part. Smit, given a character he has said was written for her, plays grief without the old melodramatic wail, which some viewers read as rigor and others as a withheld movie. Criado’s Bonifacio, firefighter and underwear model and stripper, is the film’s most old-fashioned Almodóvar object: a beautiful man offered as care. Then the script forgets to tell you whether he is waiting, hurting, or both.

Sony Booked New York for November

Sony Pictures Classics bought the North American rights on August 26, 2025, days after the wrap, extending a run that already included Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers, Strange Way of Life and The Room Next Door. The U.S. campaign is now the live one. The official teaser is already out.

THE ROAD TO NOVEMBER

1. August 26, 2025: Sony Pictures Classics takes North American rights from El Deseo.
2. March 20, 2026: Warner Bros. Pictures opens the film in Spain.
3. May 19, 2026: It plays Cannes competition and later yields the Soundtrack Award to Iglesias.
4. August 28, 2026: Curzon opens it in Britain and Ireland.
5. September 13, 2026: Toronto hosts the North American premiere.
6. September 22, 2026: San Sebastián plays it in Made in Spain, with the New York Film Festival main slate still ahead.
7. November 13, 2026: Sony opens in New York and Los Angeles, then expands nationwide on November 25.

Almodóvar has said audiences have been willing to take the movie on its quirky terms, and that he is focused on whether the story works, not on his own well-being. November 13 is the next date that will test that claim in the territory that still hands him his American life. The Christmas lights in the 2004 strand were an irritant to a woman with a bad head. The release plan treated them the same way.