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The COVID-19 pandemic had made movie fans expect constant delays for highly anticipated movies. It doesn’t matter anymore whether your movie is an indie, a blockbuster, or even who directed it. The pandemic’s ongoing impact on movie theaters means that any feature film is vulnerable to sizeable delays to maximize its best possible box office performance. One of the few new wide theatrical releases of January 2022 is a title that’s no stranger to extensive release date postponements. However, for The King’s Daughter featuring Pierce Brosnan, Kaya Scodelario and Benjamin Walker, such delays were going on long before the words “COVID-19” and “social distancing” entered people’s everyday lexicon and reflect a production that’s been anything but a happy fairy tale.
The long and troubled history of The King’s Daughter dates back to the era of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Yes, back in the 1990s, not only did BoJack Horseman have a very famous TV show, but this fantasy feature film began production. Based on the 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre, this text initially had its film rights acquired by Jim Henson Productions in 1999 (it was also set to share the name of its source material). Up to this point, the largest feature film exploits from this company that didn’t star Kermit the Frog were fantasy projects like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
This makes making it understandable why a fantasy novel like The Moon and the Sun, which told the story of King Louis XIV trapping a mystical mermaid, would seem ripe for adaptation by Jim Henson Productions. Tony-nominated theater director Christopher Renshaw was tapped to make his first voyage into the world of motion pictures by directing this production. Despite having a crew in place and a seemingly perfect production home, The Moon and the Sun went on radio silence after this. The stars were no longer aligned and it wouldn’t be until 2001 that another update would emerge on the feature.
Producer Bill Mechanic, who had been involved in the original Jim Henson Productions version of this endeavor, took The Moon and the Sun over to Disney as part of his new contract with the studio in 2001. The reveal of this development also delivered the bombshell news that the lead role of the film had been cast: Natalie Portman was on board to star. Fresh off her work in The Phantom Menace, this was a major get for The Moon and the Sun while it was also revealed that this motion picture would finally roll before the cameras in 2002. It had taken a while for further news to emerge on The Moon and the Sun but what news had come ashore was certainly ideal.
After this, though, no further news would emerge on this iteration of The King’s Daughter. The only mention of this film for roughly a decade came about in a most unusual place. A profile of Bill Mechanic from Michigan State University in 2010 would briefly note that Mechanic was working on the film and claimed that Daniel Radcliffe was now attached to star. Given the dearth of developments, you could be forgiven for believing that the project was dead in the water. But the fall of 2013 would bring a startling development: this adaptation was back on. Not only that but financing had been secured and filming was gearing up to finally begin.
What finally brought The Moon and the Sun back from the dead? An ingredient that was proving to be Hollywood’s savior in the first half of the 2010s: financing from Chinese media companies. Hollywood companies were reveling in an influx of cash from Chinese studios in this era and this particular fantasy project was reaping the benefits of these ongoing collaborations. Chinese media company Maodi Group was putting up a healthy amount of the budget while another entity from this country, Kylin Films, would eventually step up to provide $20.5 million for the film. Additionally, Fan Bingbing, a Chinese movie star, was now a part of the production.
Proving even more influential on the production was Australia, which was also providing financing for The Moon and the Sun while the whole movie would be shot in Melbourne, Australia. “We have a beautiful French story, acclaimed English and Chinese actors, and the best Australian creative talent all combining to make a completely unique adult fairy tale,” Mechanic observed about this version of the project, succinctly summarizing the global merging of talent that made it possible for The Moon and the Sun to emerge from the dead. Even better, this long-gestating project had distribution in the form of Focus Features in North America and Universal Pictures in the rest of the world.
In April 2014, principal photography finally began for this production, while four months later Paramount Pictures announced it would take over U.S. distribution duties from Focus Features. This development came with the news that Paramount would be launching The Moon and the Sun in movie theaters on April 10, 2015. While things briefly looked rosy, the movie had its theatrical release outright canceled just a few weeks before it was set to debut in theaters.
Given the complete absence of marketing for The Moon and the Sun up to that point, this wasn’t a shock. Plus, Paramount, in this era, tended to abruptly call off the release of movies like The Little Prince or Same Kind of Different as Me before they found alternative studios to handle their releases. Fans of the source material or those observing the long journey this movie had been on likely presumed this would be the same outcome for The Moon and the Sun. However, the years stretched on and on and no further news came out on further release plans, not even when a new regime was installed at Paramount Pictures in early 2017.
A staggering six years after cameras first started rolling on The Moon and the Sun, news finally emerged on the feature. Now carrying the title The King’s Daughter, ArcLight Films was now selling the feature to worldwide distributors, with the company also revealing that Julie Andrews was now a part of the cast as a heretofore unannounced narrator. Eventually, Gravitas Ventures would snag the U.S. distribution rights to the project. A slight step down from prior potential distributors like Disney and Focus Features, the filmography of Gravitas Ventures ranges from the Oscar-nominated documentary The Mole Agent to the 2019 thriller Cuck.
Whether or not The King’s Daughter is any good will be up to critics and audiences to decide. What is apparent, though, is that the film’s long and winding road to the big screen is full of more twists and compelling detours than many classic fairy tales. It’s taken so long for The King’s Daughter to reach theaters that its director, Sean McNamara, has managed to helm a slew of other movies, ranging from The Miracle Season to Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite, in the interim period.
The long road to the big screen has allowed the various incarnations of The King’s Daughter to inhabit various eras of Hollywood’s history, including a pre-Bob Iger period when Disney was primarily focused on medium-sized family movies as well as Hollywood’s peak fascination with Chinese financing and talent. Taking so many detours to get released means The King’s Daughter is arriving in a drastically different pop culture landscape than when it first started filming, let alone when the film rights to its source material were secured at the end of the 1990s. With a theatrical debut finally secured, all that’s left is the quality of the feature to determine if a happily ever after will finally arrive for The King’s Daughter.