The Royal Treatment: Why Is a Bland Romcom a Smash Hit?
- Mohit Kumar
- Sep 16, 2022
- 3 min read
The no-stars, no-buzz, no-budget film about a hairdresser falling for a prince has shot to the top of the global charts
The majority of Netflix's top 10 makes perfect sense. The television shows and movies that make up that list are frequently big, flashy, and much publicized. Don't Look Up is a prime example. Take a look at how much media coverage that movie received when it first came out a few weeks ago. Take a look at all the praise that was given to the cast, the director, and the release's themes. It was truly impossible to avoid it.
Anyway, Don't Look Up is the fourth-most-watched English-language movie on Netflix right now. The first is a movie called The Royal Treatment, which has no famous actors, no urgent message, and hardly any press. Nevertheless, during the final week of January, viewers from all around the world clocked 26 and a half million minutes of viewing time. That's 2.5 times as much time as they invested in watching Don't Look Up. So what is happening?
Now, your initial reaction might be that The Royal Treatment is a fantastic movie and that its success on Netflix is a result of merit. But if you believe that, it's likely that you haven't seen The Royal Treatment in its entirety. It's not bad, but anyone who thinks The Royal Treatment is actually good should probably have their assets seized by the government.
In the movie The Royal Treatment, a hairdresser meets a prince and develops feelings for him. I'm done now. The movie concludes after she cuts hair, meets a prince, and falls in love. It is completely repetitive in every manner. The Royal Treatment may have run for 26.5 million minutes despite my desire to avoid making any assumptions, as 160 million viewers may have seen the opening minute of the movie, predicted how the rest of it would end, and then switched it off.
It's the kind of movie that can only exist because Netflix can gather audience information. A Netflix algorithm discovered that millions of viewers enjoy films about females who fall in love with princes that are aggressively unoffensive, and as a result, this was created. Nobody requested it, and nobody showed any interest in it, but the algorithm determined that there would be a market for it, and thus it is now available.
In no way does it qualify as a bad movie. There are certain performances that are absolutely watchable. It's especially impressive how Laura Marano, who portrays the hairdresser, dances on the verge of parody, as if she realises the movie isn't very good and has decided to just have fun instead. In that regard, she reminded me of a young Fran Drescher, and I mean that entirely as a compliment.
It isn't perfect, it's true. This kind of movie needs a big emotional climax at the end of the second act, and how quickly it's handled can indicate carelessness. Another, more blatant clue is when a character answers a landline call and checks the caller ID by gazing at the receiver as if it were a mobile phone, despite the fact that it is only a plastic landline receiver. But hey, no movie is flawless.
The Royal Treatment's popularity may thus serve as further evidence that audiences and critics have quite different values and that a delightful and popular work can nevertheless find success in the general public even in the absence of critical acclaim. But this doesn’t seem to be the case either, because barely anyone is talking about it.
The majority of the little conversation on The Royal Treatment on Twitter is about all the questionable accents. When you search for the movie on TikTok, which you might expect would be the place where this kind of discussion would take place, you mostly receive cast updates from the set. Yes, there is a video of a teen girl going completely insane over a picture of the main protagonists kissing, but she can't possibly be held accountable for all those millions of minutes, can she? Does she?
The mystery still exists. The Royal Treatment is still a crazy, out-of-control success story despite being a boring little nothing that serves no discernible purpose and has failed to generate any real discussion anywhere. Maybe thousands of computers are all streaming the film, muted and on a loop, to get the views up. Or maybe I’m more out of touch than I thought. Who am I kidding, it’s the last one.
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