This weekend you have a chance to get away from what feels like nonstop media coverage of The Royal Wedding by going to the movies-- neither the gearheads of Fast Five nor the high schoolers of Prom care at all about William and Kate, and though Morgan Spurlock has a ton of sponsors in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, Buckingham Palace is not one of them. And yet, at some point royal wedding fever is going to trickle down even to the movies, though maybe by then you won't be quite so worn out by it. According to Deadline Michael Weber and Scott Neustadter, the writers behind (500) Days of Summer, have sold a pitch to Sony Pictures that's described as "Notting Hill meets Meet The Royal Parents." But if you're familiar with the mid--00s work of Julia Stiles, you might just call it a spin on The Prince and Me.
Yes, this is a film about a girl from the Midwest who travels to the UK and, as we all have at some point in foreign travels, winds up marrying a prince. The Meet The Royal Parents part of the pitch makes it sound like much of the film will focus on the culture clash between her salt-of-the-earth parents and the stuffy royals, maybe inspired by what's probably been a hilarious series of meetings between Prince Charles and Camilla and the slightly oddball Middletons,. Or maybe Neustadter and Weber are smart enough to distance their story significantly from all this royal wedding nonsense, knowing by the time this movie comes out we'll have moved on.
The pitch itself doesn't automatically sound all that promising-- do we really need some rom-com wish fulfillment about an average girl becoming a princess?-- but (500) Days of Summer might not have sounded all that great at its basic level either. Neustadter and Weber did something really original with the romantic comedy on that film, and with this they might be taking an even more traditional narrative and adding a fresher spin. We don't come across many romantic comedies that seem even the least bit promising, so with even a shred of a reason to have faith in this, I'm choosing to believe.
