Legacy sequels are usually built to reassure. The safe play is to reheat the original’s pleasures with the volume raised a notch and let an audience that has aged twenty years bring its own children along. The Princess Diaries 3 has just done the opposite: its makers threw out a completed script and started again — not because a test screening went badly, but because they decided the wrong idea sat at its center. The wrong idea was a grown woman still being written as a princess.

Anne Hathaway delivered the news as an apology dressed up as good news. As Deadline relayed her comments, she told a talk-show audience, “I think we had a story breakthrough,” before conceding the catch: “The script that we were working on — we kind of had to start over with this new direction, which is not the update I think anybody wants, but we all feel really good that this is gonna be the one.” A finished draft, credited to Flora Greeson, is gone. What replaces it is less a plot than a thesis.

That thesis belongs to Adele Lim, the Crazy Rich Asians writer turned director whom Disney handed the franchise. Lim frames the reboot as a correction to the entire princess economy: there are countless wish-fulfilment movies for princesses, she has said, and almost none for queens — the aim now is “to show a woman in her full power.” Mia Thermopolis, crowned at the close of the 2004 sequel, would return not as an ingénue relearning which fork to use but as a head of state. That reframes the redo as ideology rather than indecision.

The gamble is that nostalgia survives being rerouted. Lim has promised “a lot of fun returns” for fans of the first two films and a Genovia finally shot on location in Europe “in its full glory,” and Meg Cabot, whose novels started all of this, reportedly came away from a draft saying there is “a part for everybody.” Chris Pine has signaled he is game; Sandra Oh has stayed noncommittal; Julie Andrews has gently suggested her moment may have passed. The reunion, in other words, is a negotiation, not a guarantee.

Disney announced the film in 2024 with Lim attached, and there is still no greenlight, no start date and no signed cast beyond Hathaway, who confirmed her own return. The real clock is hers. The Devil Wears Prada 2 jumped the queue, three Hathaway films crowd 2026, and she is expecting her third child, which she has said pushes any shoot further out. She broke the latest news, fittingly, from Andy Cohen’s couch.

For a franchise about a girl who never asked to rule, the holdup is almost too on-message: an entire production waiting on the queen’s schedule.

Tags: Disney, Anne Hathaway, legacy-sequel, Adele Lim, The Princess Diaries