Here’s some news to make you spit out your tea and shout, “Shut up!”: apparently, Princess Diaries 3 might be happening. Anne Hathaway, who starred as the klutzy high schooler-turned-princess Mia Thermopolis in the first two films back in the early 2000s, recently opened up about a potential third film.
“We’re in a good place,” she said coyly to V Magazine, adding, “That’s all I can say. There’s nothing to announce yet. But we’re in a good place.”
This may be a little vague, but it the best news we’ve heard about Genovia’s royal family in a while. Disney green-lit the project back in 2022, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Later that year, Hathaway praised the decision, telling Entertainment Tonight, “I would more than entertain it, I’m pulling for it. If there’s any way to get Julie Andrews involved, I think we would make it work. We would go to where she was and put a green screen behind her and just make it happen.”
However, more recently, Andrews, who starred as Mia’s grandmother, Queen Clarisse Renaldi of Genovia, put a damper on our hopes of a threequel. Although she admitted to Today that “there was a dialogue about it,” but that “nothing had been realized”.
She went on, “And I think I may be wrong, but I think it’s been shelved now. I can’t be sure.” She did add, “I’d be very happy if we did do another one, but I don’t expect to.”
After all of these conflicting messages about the third installment, we have to say, Hathaway’s latest hints that we might get the chance to catch up with the Renaldis could not be more welcome. After all, the first 2001 film is a bona fide classic, while the 2004 sequel was a surprisingly excellent rom-com. (We can only hope that Chris Pine reprises his role as dashing bad boy Nicholas Devereaux.)
It’s easy to see why Hathaway is eager to return to Genovia one more time. In her conversation with V Magazine, the actor gushed about her experience working on the first film with director Garry Marshall. “I was so generously invited into that process by Garry Marshall; he valued my take on being a teenage girl and elevated me to such a valued status on set that it never occurred to me on other sets that I didn’t have that same autonomy, or that same ability to collaborate,” she said.