Furthermore, the franchise has experienced a renaissance in the 2020s. Rumors of The Princess Diaries 3 have swirled for years, with Hathaway and Andrews both expressing interest. In 2022, Cabot even released a new book in the series, The Princess Diaries: Royal Wedding , which follows an adult Mia. The hunger for this world is clearly still alive.
It is a film where the biggest villain is a mean girl who laughs at a chipped nail. It is a film where a teenage girl solves her problems by telling the truth in a speech. It is a film where the grandmother is the hero, not the enemy. For women who grew up in the early 2000s, Mia Thermopolis was a surrogate—proof that you could be clumsy, scared, and unpolished, and still become a queen. the princess diaries 2001
The film’s romantic subplot is deliberately unsatisfying in the most satisfying way. Josh is a mirage. He only notices Mia after her transformation, proving that his interest is in the crown, not the girl. The real love interest, Lilly’s older brother Michael Moscovitz (Robert Schwartzman), has been there all along—building robotics, lending her his sweaters, and appreciating her rants about Genovian political corruption. Michael sees Mia before she is a princess, and he loves her precisely for her awkward, passionate, uncool self. Their relationship, culminating in the infamous “saved by the bell” kiss, is the film’s quiet rebuttal to fairy-tale romance. True partnership is not about a grand rescue but about mutual recognition. Mia does not need a prince; she needs someone who will stand beside her after she has saved herself. Furthermore, the franchise has experienced a renaissance in
Mia Thermopolis (Hathaway) is a invisibly shy, klutzy high school student in San Francisco. She lives with her bohemian artist mother (Caroline Goodall) and tries to survive the daily humiliations of teenage life, from failing her driver’s test to being ignored by the popular clique. The hunger for this world is clearly still alive