In every indie bookstore in America, there’s a little stand somewhere near the cash register filled with stickers. They tend to break down into a few categories: relatively current pop culture obsessions (the Tonya “these gays are trying to kill me” sticker), cat obsessions (bookstores are happy to meme their customers and customers are usually happy to accept the labels), and reading-specific obsessions, most germane to our purposes, the “the book is better” sticker.
The stereotype that all filmed adaptations of books share an irrevocable inferiority to their source material is a treasured one. Like all stereotypes, it does not have a 100% accuracy rate. There are a whole host of series and movies based on books that have transcended, complicated, and enriched their source material. Bridgerton, for instance, is, to my mind, not only a better piece of content than its source material, it’s also much more creative. The two most recent adaptations of Pride and Prejudice are both phenomenal films that stand on their own as pieces of art. In their case, as with many such adaptations, the question of “which is better?” feels inappropriate and reductive. There are also many adaptations that hit their mark, thoughtfully translating characters from page to screen, such as the 1985 A Room With a View or the currently running adaptation of The Summer I Turned Pretty.
But there are indeed many adaptations that veer off course, disappointing fans and confusing story newcomers. A notable recent example, The Hobbit films, is so overstuffed with supplementary material and so tonally inconsistent as to be nearly unwatchable. My most unpopular opinion on this is in regards to the Game of Thrones adaptations, which I think fail the test of good adaptations by not only refusing to confront the rougher edges of the books (Martin’s writing unfortunately salivates when describing sexual scenes involving very underage characters, something the adaptation often carries through), but also elevates and furthers some of Martin’s worst qualities (using sexual assault as a go-to plot device, inconsistent characterization, an unfailing belief that people will almost always be their worst selves).
But the adaptation I wish to discuss today falls between the gaps of these categories. Watching Red, White, and Royal Blue (Amazon), adapted from the beloved romance novel by Casey McQuiston, is an exercise in the bittersweet. I came into it cold, never having read the book, and left it with a desperate desire to read a fully realized version of what I had just seen. For that is it’s true failing: it is a project that suffers from underinvestment and under commitment. As such, it is ultimately underwhelming. Which is a real shame, because there are elements to this adaptation that moved me, excited me, and enchanted me. The best thing I can say about it is it drove me straight to the bookstore.
Red, White, and Royal Blue tells the love story of Alex Claremont-Diaz, the half-Mexican son of the first female U.S. President and England’s Prince Henry, spare to the throne. It is a classic enemies to lovers story, complicated by Alex’s latent bisexuality and Henry’s very closeted homosexuality. They fight, they become begrudging friends, they realize they’re totally hot for each other, they fall in love. McQuiston intentionally employs many of the tropes straight romance novels use to such comforting effect, giving queer readers the chance to see themselves in those stories and straight readers a reading experience that is refreshingly not about their personal identification. The novel is exquisite: horny, funny, sparkling, emotional, sweet. It’s a modern fairytale, complete with a prince on a white Polo pony and a rising biracial political star who believes the liberals can flip Texas. McQuiston can write and doesn’t fall into any of annoying modern writing tics that sour otherwise good novels.
Gay romance novels are not unheard of, but proportionately they do not make up a large percentage of the shelves. Queer romance has been growing in the last decade, spurred by the influential existence of BookTok, where this book originally caught fire. And caught fire it most certainly did. Within months of its publication, it had sold over 100,000 copies and gone through seven printings, without any of the traditional bona fides that fuel such virality. It wasn’t picked for Reese or Oprah’s book club, and its publisher didn’t put any huge marketing behind it. It was, after all, a very gay romance novel from a first-time author. Yet, it became a massive hit, partly thanks to its BookTok popularity, hitting the New York Times bestseller list soon after it was published. As of this writing, it is back on the paperback trade fiction bestseller list, where it has been for 23 weeks since publication in 2019. That list has been dominated by the romance genre of late, representing an intriguing shift in reader attitude towards a genre that was long relegated to the mass market list or, more recently, the eBook list, if it appeared on any lists at all.
This kind of buzz around your source material gives a film adaptation a massive head start. It promises you the most important thing you need: eyeballs. So it is puzzling that this film appears to have had the budget of a mid-tier Hallmark Christmas movie. It doesn’t look or feel like a real movie (Harry Styles knows). It frankly looks terrible; every set looks made of cardboard, there are no crowd shots despite this being a film that includes several pivotal plot points involving large crowds, there’s weird Disney-channel original movie-esque CGI/animation scattered throughout that’s meant to be whimsical but comes off as shortcuts in lieu of actual composed shots. It looks like the rough draft of a movie. The writing and editing is similarly unfinished; so much character-development and world-building from the book is left out in order to give us more time with the lovers, but it only serves to make them feel like the only vibrant pieces in this puzzle. Why spend your casting budget on Uma Thurman as the first female U.S. president and then give her nothing to do and no character to embody? The two leads I must exempt from my criticism; part of the reason the movie focuses on them so much is they are a lovely center to this story. Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine are perfect as Alex and Henry and the film does not, to its credit, shy away from the physical aspects of their love story. There’s a boldness to them and their chemistry and a sweetness that has us rooting for them from start to finish. But their level of quality makes the messiness of everything surrounding them even more disappointing.
The film has received mixed reviews, mostly depending on how much the reviewer was willing to ignore all that messiness. The New York Times, surprisingly, liked it quite a lot, focusing on the chemistry between the leads and the general atmosphere of horny pining. Other outlets were not so kind, although almost everyone praised the film for centering the physical romance of the lovers in a more heated and anatomically accurate way than most. But whatever they’re saying, everyone is talking about it. The source material and the charisma of the leads has been enough to make this movie a part of the conversation. The elements were all in place for this movie to be so much more.
The questions I came to this essay with were simple: why was the budget on this film so low and why was it not released in theatres? Those boil down to one larger question: why did Amazon Studios choose to invest so little in a project that very likely could deliver such a large, devoted audience? Why did Amazon Studios give another book, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart, a full miniseries, including Sigourney Weaver in an excellent part well-suited to her skills, a budget that allowed it to look not only competent but gorgeous, and a cast of interesting characters with backstories and drives of their own? That novel is not exactly an anonymous one, but no bookstore within driving distance of me carries it, and despite my obsessive chronicling of what’s coming out where and when and who is reviewing it, I had never heard of it. It’s currently listed at #191,657 in Books on Amazon and #32,829 in Contemporary Romance, despite being a novel Amazon Studios itself adapted. Red, White, and Royal Blue is currently #12 in Romantic Comedy Books, #19 in Books overall, and, somehow, #2 in American Literature. For reference, Fahrenheit 451 is #6 on that list.
What I don’t want to imply here, though I’d forgive you for reading that into it, is that the reason Amazon shortchanged this novel is simply because this is a queer male love story. I suspect the fact it is adapted from a romance novel has more to do with it than internalized homophobia, but I do wonder if the way a movie like Bros bombed at the box office last year influenced the decision to keep it from a theatrical release. But then again, there’s a movie like Love, Simon, also adapted from a novel by a first-time author, which got a 2018 theatrical release, made a decent amount of money, and received critically positive reviews. In terms of sweetness, Red, White, and Royal Blue feels more like Love, Simon, although in terms of raunchiness it is perhaps closer to Bros. But, unfortunately, there are just not that many comps to bring to this conversation. What we do have are the many romance novel adaptations floating around out there, many of which have been treated with profound disrespect by their production studio. I feel like the most likely answer for why this adaptation looks comparable to last year’s Lindsey Lohan Netflix Christmas ski chalet amnesia flick is that studios are somehow still ignoring the built-in rabidly obsessively engaged audience for romance novel adaptations. How that’s possible, post-Bridgerton, baffles me. I just have this persistent vision of an alternate universe where a better version of this movie comes out a couple weeks after Barbie, with all the go-to-the-theater energy that has generated. The Barbie demographic would eat this movie up like a McFlurry. That universe could have been a reality; it is only the investment of money and time (and a willingness to embrace some risk) that kept it from being so. Instead, we got a half-assed version of a truly good thing. We, as readers, and we as consumers deserve better than that.
I love talking to people who work at independent bookstores because they truly do love books. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this adaptation was quick to tell me how much they enjoyed it. To them (and to me) it is reminiscent of early 2000s fare like What a Girl Wants or The Lizzie McGuire Movie or Chasing Liberty. I kept thinking about My Date With the President’s Daughter so much I can’t help but feel like at least one writer was consciously doing an homage. These movies were silly and low-budget, but they were fun teenage empowerment fare. When I went to buy Red, White, and Royal Blue, the woman at the checkout immediately asked me if I’d seen the adaptation, a big smile on her face. “But of course, the book is so much better,” she was quick to add, “when you read it, you really get the full story.” And indeed, she was right.