Disney is developing a new Princess Diaries but hasn’t made a deal with Anne Hathaway yet
Original director Garry Marshall died, so the new movie has a writer and that's it
Imagine you’re the head of Disney. You’re one of a few guys named Bob, you get paid untold millions of dollars every year to drag your feet on deciding whether or not you should weigh in on important social issues, and you’ve just decided to move forward with a third Princess Diaries movie. Not a remake, not a reboot, but a proper continuation of the original Genovia saga. Garry Marshall is dead, so you can’t talk to him, but wouldn’t your first call—the one you make maybe even before saying “yeah, let’s do this”—be to original star Anne Hathaway? Isn’t it kind of important that you know if she’s on board?
Well, that’s why some other guy named Bob is the head of Disney and not you, because apparently that’s the sort of problem you solve later. Either way, The Hollywood Reporter says that Disney is indeed moving ahead with a new Princess Diaries, but “according to sources,” Anne Hathaway “does not have a deal to return” (yet). THR notes that she’s expressed an eagerness to go back to The Princess Diaries in the past, something that can’t be said about The Devil Wears Prada (which Hathaway recently said wouldn’t work in today’s digital media landscape).
What we do know about this new movie is that Aadrita Mukerji, a veteran of Supergirl and Reacher, will be writing it. The original two movies starred Hathaway as an American teenager who realizes she’s the heir to the throne of a European nation called Genovia. A modern continuation would presumably be about Hathaway’s character having a daughter who is now writing her own princess diaries, but they could do without necessarily needing Hathaway… maybe there was a revolution in Genovia and the royal family was deposed, forcing the rightful princess to go into hiding in the United States…. until a loyalist faction begins to amass power and tries to put the royals back in charge?