The recent cancellation of Batgirl with only the final touches of post-production still to go indicates that Hollywood isn’t above washing its hands of a movie it wants nothing to do with, but the team behind The King’s Daughter evidently did not get that memo.
You may not have even noticed that the $40 million adaptation of Vonda M. McIntyre’s fantasy novel The Moon and the Sun even released earlier this year, given that it scored a disastrous domestic debut of just $723,000 from over 2000 theaters, ultimately failing to even scrape together $2 million globally.
While that’s a catastrophe whatever way you want to look at it, the many failures of The King’s Daughter are compounded when you realize that the star-studded story of a desperate monarch’s desire to secure immortality initially wrapped shooting in March of 2014, a full seven years and 10 months before it was dumped into multiplexes.
With a script penned by three-time Academy Award nominee James Schamus, never mind an eclectic ensemble of prestigious veterans and rising stars that numbered Pierce Brosnan, Julie Andrews, William Hurt, Pablo Schrieber, Kaya Scodelario, Benjamin Walker, and Fan Bingbing, you can understand why Gravitas Ventures decided to take a punt on the forgotten flick.
The King’s Daughter will go down as a footnote in history for its torturous road to the big screen, but it’s been proving surprisingly popular for at-home audiences, having resurfaced on streaming. Per FlixPatrol, the curious case of the decade-long dud has become one of the 20 most-watched titles on Amazon this weekend, so at least folks are finally seeing it.
