Besides instilling unrealistic expectations about love and relationships in children, the problem with Disney princesses is that, once the obsession takes hold, it can get expensive. There are the dolls, and the dresses, and the picture books, and the DVDs, and the next thing you know you’re booking tickets to Orlando so your daughter can have a tea party with a twentysomething in a yellow ball gown who can’t believe she spent four years at FSU for this.
Now, in its infinite lust for cash, Disney has decided to create itself a new merchandising opportunity by greenlighting its first movie based around a Disney prince. The prince in question is Prince Charming, the generic royal who married Cinderella and, other than that, has no personality to speak of. (He’s a good dancer, we guess?) The Hollywood Reporter has few details on the story except that it will be a “revisionist take” (Prince Charming in a fedora, perhaps?), but The Guardian claims the story will be about the Prince’s not-so-charming, unlucky-in-love brother. Matt Fogel, a onetime assistant to Phil Lord and Chris Miller whose lone screenwriting credit to date is Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son, wrote the screenplay.
The Prince Charming movie is the newest in a line of live-action remakes of its animated classics Disney has greenlit in recent months, including (but not exclusive to) a Dumbo movie directed by Tim Burton, a Winnie The Pooh movie written by Alex Ross Perry, and a Pinocchio movie written and possibly to be directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. With that kind of track record, we could very well see David Fincher’s name on the Prince Charming poster when and if this project makes it to theaters. “I am Prince Charming’s fringe epaulets.”