What I Want From the 'Red, White & Royal Blue' Sequel — and, Of Course, What I Don't
Want: an Abby Lee Miller cameo. Don’t want: a ‘Sex and the City: The Movie’ redo.
When the queer rom-com Red, White & Royal Blue was released last August, I promptly ate crow and declared it an immediate Oscar contender. I was being hyperbolic, but the underlying sentiment — that this was an excellent film — was all truth. In the months since, as I’ve slogged my way through other recent entries in the rom-com canon (Anyone but You, The Idea of You, Maybe I Do) none have been able to capture this film’s breeziness. It wasn’t marketed to death, it didn’t over-promise on the chemistry of its leads nor did it oversell its status as one of the rare LGBTQ+-centric offerings within the genre. I realize how this sounds now knowing that it was based on a best-selling novel, one named Book of the Year by everyone from NPR to Vogue and deemed a “BookTok sensation” by the New York Times, but for me, what worked most in this film’s favor was the low expectations I had for it. I’d never heard of the book nor its stars; the hype had evaded my gaze. What I knew was I needed something to watch with my then-fiancé and this movie popped up upon a cursory search.
That was then. On May 10, Amazon MGM Studios announced that a sequel for Red, White & Royal Blue is in the works, and with it, leveled up expectations about the future for our star-crossed lovers Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry. The film’s writer/director Matthew Lopez will return, this time teaming up with the book’s author Casey McQuiston to co-write the screener, as will stars Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine.
But with no direct source material this go-round, it’s essential that we prognosticate potential plot points — particularly one I hope they’ll avoid.
If I had to take an educated guess, I’d conjecture that the film will center around a royal wedding. In October 2022, McQuiston released the Red, White & Royal Blue: Collector’s Edition of the book which featured a brand new chapter told from Henry’s perspective. In it, readers learn that Alex and Henry got engaged and moved to Austin to start a life together with Alex having completed law school and Henry walking away from the Crown. The wedding does not take place in the book, but we learn of plans for a small, private wedding at Alex’s lake house which the pair visit in the first film, so it would make quite a bit of logistical sense to center the film around the wedding.
But a film needs conflict. And thus my worry.