News of Hollywood franchise reboots are so frequent as to be usually unremarkable, even tiresome. But Disney’s announcement last week that it was developing a Princess Diaries 3 film felt different. “The Princess Diaries 3 movie,” in the words of a popular tweet, “will heal our broken nation.”
That may sound over-dramatic – after all, cultural objects beloved by teenage girls invite suspicion at worst and polite tolerance at best; things that also fall under the banner of “chick-lit” doubly so. And yet the films, and the Meg Cabot books that provided their source material, arguably taught my teenaged self more about life – and even politics – than textbooks did. They were certainly more fun.
