If you had to choose one word to describe the films of Paddington and Wonka director Paul King, you could do a lot worse than to go with “charming.” Maybe that’s the idea behind his next project, a live-action movie based on the character of Prince Charming. The movie, which hails from Disney, will presumably fill in some blanks for the character in the same way King’s Wonka did. After all, like Wonka, Prince Charming is generally not the lead character in his story, and tends to come into the plot pretty fully-formed.
With King attached, it seems likely that Prince Charming will be a little more traditional and less genre-bending than something like Shrek, which took aim at fairy tale tropes and established a punk-rock sensibility to fantasy that has been echoed throughout other movies, TV, and books.
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According to Deadline, who first reported the deal, Simon Farnaby and Jon Croker (Paddington 2) are co-writing the screenplay along with King. In addition to the Paddington movies, Farnaby is known for the Wonka screenplay and as a writer on the U.K. version of the hit sitcom Ghosts.
The question of whether Prince Charming is a character at all, or a kind of archetypal way of describing the royalty who comes in to sweep a heroine off her feet, was at the heart of his depiction in Fables, the DC/Vertigo comic from writer Bill Willingham.
Other projects in recent years have boiled Prince Charming down to being a pretty, dumb, rich guy — something that seems outside the bounds of what King would want to explore. It seems more likely that we will get some insight into what makes a prince so picky that he’ll follow a woman around with half a pair of shoes.
It’s not uncommon for any Disney prince to be called “Prince Charming” colloquially, but they do have names, and Prince Charming is at least in theory the man who eventually marries Cinderella. Deadline reports this movie will not necessarily tie directly to Cinderella.
King has been on a roll since Paddington; both of those movies drew near-universal praise, becoming some of the highest-rated movies ever on Rotten Tomatoes. Wonka didn’t fare quite as well with critics, but was still widely acclaimed and earned over $600 million at the box office.
Prior to Paddington, the only feature film King had directed was the little-remembered Bunny and the Bull, which starred Farnaby (himself a comedian as well as writer) in a lead role.