The world’s biggest navel-gazers have finally hooked a buzzy latest project.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have acquired the film rights to the Recent York Times bestselling novel “Meet Me on the Lake,” by Carley Fortune, which cost a cool $3 million.
They’ll be developing it for Netflix who, back in 2020, inked the couple to a multi-year $100 million deal.
Is that this pivot from specializing in themselves into fiction some kind of redemption?
All of us knew the juice had been squeezed out of the lemon after “Spare,” the gag-inducing “Harry & Meghan” docu-series and a failed $20 million “Spotify” deal — by which they failed to provide anything beyond Meghan’s podcast ode to her personal grievances, with bonus celebrity guests.
Could this latest move be proof that Harry and Meghan, who’re in a rebrand effort under the hand of WME honcho Ari Emmanuel, are finally turning the corner after their high-priced, high-ego failures to launch?
Hardly. It simply underscores their narcissism.
Selecting this romantic novel, which mirrors a good amount of their very own biographies, is one more sign of the couple’s self-centered and boring devotion to the themes that keep them atop the throne of victimhood.
In line with Deadline, the book’s plot points include “childhood trauma, including losing a parent in a automotive crash” — shades of tragic Princess Diana — in addition to “mental health challenges and post-natal depression.”
The story, which is about two 30somethings falling in love, also has a broken friendship (hello, Jessica Mulroney, who Markle reportedly dumped “to look woke“) and takes place in and around Toronto, where Markle’s old TV show “Suits” was filmed.
Sounds eerily familiar. The one thing missing is a fight with a sister-in-law over flower girl dresses and a sit down with a talk-show host named Moprah Minfrey.
This alternative shows the Sussexes’ keen inability to even consider a world beyond their very own “lived experiences.”
The boring but handsomely paid pair at the moment are simply laundering their very own fastidiously crafted tales through another person’s work of fiction.
Great storytellers can channel others’ points of views with empathy, summon imagination and create worlds most of us couldn’t imagine.
But Harry and Meghan, who find themselves endlessly fascinating, are all the time trekking down the identical trails inside their very own bubble.
At this point, they seem to be aspiring reality stars — wannabe Snookies and Sandovals — just itching for more of their agenda to be projected on the boob tube. But they’re now doing it through veiled methods to present them respectability.
Trauma influencer Prince Harry couldn’t get his preposterous podcast idea — diving into the childhoods of Trump and Putin — on the air for Spotify. Meghan’s animated series “Pearl” a couple of “young girl who learns to step into her power” was nixed by Netflix.
Even the couple’s latest image makeover — much needed after their skilled bombs and shamefully exaggerated tale in May, once they claimed to have been in a “near-catastrophic” paparazzi chase — has featured their best hits: entitlement and an absence of private accountability.
In a People magazine cover story last week, a source defended the pair, saying the Spotify deal sputtered out because they were “given no formal lay of the land to kick things off, in order that they were already on unsteady footing even before the ink was dry.”
Besides it being oddly much like Meghan’s assertion that the royals didn’t prepare her for royal life, it uses the word “given.” Therein lies their great assumption: They’d be handed all the things together with a bag of money.
If most individuals were paid that sort of scratch despite having no experience, they might make it a mission to work out the lay of the land on their very own.
The lone project that shows any promise is “The Heart of Invictus,” which is able to reportedly be out later this month on Netflix. I expect it to in regards to the wounded warriors — their grit, determination and athletic triumph after life-altering injuries. It’s likely not about Harry.
Not less than I pray it’s not.
If this were pro sports, Harry and Meghan would have been cut from the team a protracted time again and mercilessly mocked as busts.
But to be kind to the busts, they’d to do something remarkable to make it to the massive leagues in the primary place.
