Late last year, Netflix released a sitcom about the death of Blockbuster. You know, the video store that so many people rented or bought from back in the day. It’s a weird television subject for Netflix to tackle since they were one of the biggest reasons that the Blockbuster company went under. People were able to rent and stream movies from their home. They no longer needed to make the trip out to the store, however near or far it was, to pick up a movie. The movie would come to them. It started out as DVDs being shipped to people’s homes for rental. Then Netflix hit it big with streaming.
This post isn’t about the downfall of Blockbuster or the release of the Blockbuster sitcom on Netflix. But I want to use that as a jumping off point, because it’s not the only time that Netflix wanted a piece of someone else’s pie. In 2012, Netflix released its first original content. Lilyhammer was co-produced with a Norwegian channel, airing on that channel in Norway but on Netflix everywhere else. It ushered in a new era for the streaming service. It was no longer just a place for renting or streaming catalogue programming. Netflix would be making its own stuff and people would stay signed up for that.
Netflix began its life as competition to Blockbuster. It then became competition for the major television networks and cable channels by putting out original programming. Things would only become more fractured and territorial as studios and networks created their own streaming services to compete with it. (This intro is getting kind of long, and it’s only about halfway done). Peacock, Disney+, and Paramount+ are only a few of those services. Netflix had a couple tricks up its sleeve, though.
Think about the people that Netflix got into contracts to produce original content for them. They’ve had a deal with Happy Madison for what’s nearing ten years. Shonda Rhimes signed a deal with them. But there’s one other narrow target that Netflix had in mind. They were going to produce a line of movies to compete with what was becoming a popular sub-sub-subgenre in… Let’s say 2015. That seems about right for when Lifetime and Hallmark Christmas rom-coms went from being that annoying little bug taking up television time into a popular so-bad-it’s-good delight during the holiday season. Netflix was going to pounce on that.
They hit fairly big with A Christmas Prince in 2017. So big, in fact, that it spawned sequels in 2018 and 2019. Those aren’t what I’m here to discuss, however. There was another trilogy that began in 2018, quick on the heels of A Christmas Prince, that became just as big. If not bigger. I definitely hear more about this franchise than A Christmas Prince. These movies would see Vanessa Hudgens step into the lead role. Well, lead roles. You see, she played two, later three, women who looked the same and switched places during the holiday season. This was The Princess Switch franchise.
Stacy De Novo (Vanessa Hudgens) was a Chicago-area baker who was invited to a baking contest in Belgravia. After a spill stained her apron, she went to clean it backstage and ran into Lady Margaret Delacourt (Vanessa Hudgens). Lady Margaret was the Duchess of Montenaro, set to be married to Edward Wyndham (Sam Palladio), the Prince of Belgravia. Before her wedding ceremony, she wanted to enjoy a normal life for a few days. She made a deal with Stacy to switch places until the baking competition so they could both experience each other’s lives. In the end, Stacy fell in love with Edward while Margaret fell in love with Stacy’s friend Kevin (Nick Sagar).
There’s not much to say about The Princess Switch. It was the concept of The Prince and the Pauper, but with the Hallmark Christmas rom-com sheen and the Netflix distribution. There were two women falling in love. A baker fell in love with a prince. A princess in love with the hunky everyman. It had its cake and ate it too, excuse the pun, with the archetypal love interests in these types of movies. There was a princess/duchess and a baker. It was all the things that you typically see in movies like A Prince for Christmas, A Gingerbread Romance, or even Vanessa Hudgens’s other Netflix Christmas movie, The Knight Before Christmas.
Clearly, Netflix used The Princess Switch to cash in on the popularity of the Hallmark and Lifetime television movies. They wanted their share of that audience and were, possibly, attempting to steal away that audience. If people were already subscribed to Netflix through most of the year, they wouldn’t need to buy into those other channels for two months of television movies. Especially when Netflix was providing the same sort of entertainment. And people wouldn’t have to buy the compilation DVDs of those Lifetime or Hallmark movies either. Unless you’re me and you want to own The Christmas Consultant. But you don’t need to own them when you’re subscribed to Netflix and that kind of content is always at your fingertips.
That’s the kind of thing that Netflix does. That’s their modus operandi. They find something that’s successful somewhere. Rentals, original programming, Adam Sandler… And they take that thing. Or they try to. Sometimes they go a little too far. They find success with something, a la The Princess Switch, and then they drive that thing as hard into the ground as they can. They don’t let up on the gas and the car careens off the cliff. I’ll get to that in a bit. First, I need to get to the inevitable sequel to the successful riff on the Hallmark Christmas flicks.
The Princess Switch: Switched Again saw Stacy and Margaret reunited when Margaret was being sworn in as the new queen of Montenaro. Stacy was now married to Edward, while the romance between Margaret and Kevin had been ripped apart. Both Margaret and Kevin still loved each other, so Stacy swapped places with Margaret again. Margaret could take her mind off her swearing in for a bit and rekindle that romance. The only problem was that Stacy, as Margaret, was kidnapped and swapped out for Lady Fiona Pembroke (Vanessa Hudgens), Margaret’s cousin who wanted to steal the throne.
Much of the Hallmark or Lifetime rom-com cliché was still present in The Princess Switch: Switched Again. The focus of that storyline was Margaret and Kevin rekindling the relationship that neither had wanted to end. When Margaret was told that she would be queen, Kevin thought he wouldn’t be worthy of her royalty. He only broke up with her because he thought she wanted more or deserved someone of similar royal blood. It was a senseless breakup that they could have easily avoided with better communication. Luckily, they learned to communicate better through the course of the second film.
What changed the dynamic was the addition of a third Vanessa Hudgens character. Because her story wasn’t driven by a relationship, it added a new wrinkle to the franchise. There was now some crime being committed. Crime outside of the fraud at the centre of the concept. Fiona tried to steal the throne. She wanted the coronation pushed up so she could be crowned before Margaret came back. Her two cronies kidnapped Stacy, who was impersonating Margaret again, and held her captive. Kidnapping, fraud, and treason were all major parts of The Princess Switch: Switched Again.
The big change between The Princess Switch and its sequel was that a real villain was brought into the story. It wasn’t simply the fear that someone would find out about the switch. It was that someone was going to use the switch to try and take the queendom from Margaret. While the romance was happening, there was a villain driving the rest of the story forward. It was in the same vein as Holiday Spin, with its rival dance team, but done in a comedy-forward crime-focused way.
The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star was a completely different beast. Margaret and Stacy planned a Christmas celebration in Montenaro. One of the big pieces of the celebration was a star ornament they borrowed from the Vatican. When the star was stolen, they enlisted the help of Fiona, now sentenced to community service for her crimes, to get the star back before its loss caused an international incident. All the while, Fiona reconnected with a childhood friend and former spy, Peter Maxwell (Remy Hii).
If you noticed from that description, The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star was much more of an espionage movie than the romantic comedy the franchise had been to that point. That’s not entirely true. It was much more of a heist movie. The entire plan became Fiona and Peter breaking into Hunter Cunard’s (Will Kemp) mansion to steal back the star. There was a tech team in a van, some rappelling through skylights, and some laser dodging. There was even a pressure sensitive alarm that had to be accounted for. Many of the heist movie tropes were present.
The romance took a back seat. Sure, there was something between Fiona and her childhood friend. It was thrown right in the face of the audience throughout the entire thing. But there was never any acting on those feelings. Until the end, that is. Most of the time, Fiona was too busy pushing people away. If anything, letting people into her life was Fiona’s emotional arc. She let Peter into her life at the end. She let her estranged mother back into her life (Peter’s plan, all along). She even let Margaret and Stacy into her life after Stacy impersonated Fiona and unintentionally got her community service reduced. It was a movie about Fiona opening herself to people and finding happiness through connection. It wasn’t so much about romance.
If any of the Princess Switch movies felt furthest away from the Lifetime and Hallmark movies, at least as far as my experience with them goes, it was The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star. It didn’t have the same sort of romantic focus. The main character’s desire wasn’t to fall in love. It wasn’t to return home to the family, however reluctantly. It wasn’t even work. Their desire was to get out of their punishment from the previous film, and that involved participating in a heist. That wasn’t anywhere near where the franchise began.
Netflix is a company built on the idea of taking market share from other companies. I get that most companies are that way, as they try to compete in what could be a very full market. But Netflix seems to make that their only defining trait. They took the rental market from Blockbuster by making it easier to do from home. They took the streaming market, not by stealing it from anyone really, but by being one of the first to do it. Now look at all the competition. They took Adam Sandler from the major studios to help boost their original content. And then they turned their sights on those television Christmas rom-coms.
Movies like A Christmas Prince, The Knight Before Christmas, and The Princess Switch really leaned into the Hallmark and Lifetime rom-com tropes, trying to be as true to those movies as they could. Seemingly everybody had Netflix. Not everybody had Hallmark. They wanted to capture that audience who didn’t have the cable channels as well as steal from the audience that did. And, to an extent, they succeeded. Some of those Netflix Christmas rom-coms became successful. They became household names. They became rom-coms that people watched ironically but loved genuinely. They became Christmas classics.
Now it’s time for a few notes to wrap things up:
- I mentioned The Christmas Consultant and Holiday Spin in this post.
- Mike Rohl directed all three movies in The Princess Switch series.
- There were six actors who appeared in The Princess Switch, The Princess Switch: Switched Again, and The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star. They were Suanne Braun, Mark Fleischmann, Vanessa Hudgens, Sam Palladio, Nick Sagar, and Robin Soans.
- Florence Hall, Mia Lloyd, and Ricky Norwood were each in The Princess Switch: Switched Again and The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star.
- Sandy Welch was in Double Team before reappearing in The Princess Switch: Switched Again.
- One of the new actors for The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star was Amanda Donohoe, who was previously in The Lair of the White Worm.
- Finally, the villain, if you could call him that, of The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star was played by Will Kemp. He was also the villain in The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power.
- Have you seen The Princess Switch or any of its sequels? What did you think? What do you think about Netflix and their attempts at getting more subscribers? Let me know in the comments.
- The comments could also be used to suggest movies I should check out in future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. You could know a movie I don’t that would be a perfect fit for the blog.
- The post after this was Freddy Got Fingered. Clearly that already went up. I was a little late with this one. Anyway, check out that post to see what I watched and wrote about after this one.
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