There were always going to be knock-on effects from the staggering success of "The King's Speech," and already we've seen Madonna's hamfisted attempt take on some of the same events in "W.E," while stammering Bertie and his Queen Elizabeth will be back on screens later this year, played by Sam West and Olivia Colman, opposite Bill Murray's President Roosevelt in "Hyde Park On Hudson." But there's one other film set around the same kind of time period on the way, a project that's just found a princess.
Dakota Fanning had been attached to "Girl's Night Out," a romantic comedy from writer Trevor De Silva, for nearly a year. The script tells the story of young Princess Margaret (the role Fanning was to have taken) and her sister Elizabeth (the current Queen Elizabeth II), who are allowed to celebrate incognito with their subjects on V.E. Day, the night celebrating victory over the Nazis in World War Two. Alexandra Roach, who played the young Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady," signed on to play Elizabeth a few months back, but it appears that Fanning has dropped out of the project, only to be replaced by another baby-faced young starlet.
Baz Bamigboye reports that Juno Temple, star of "Kaboom," "Atonement," "Greenberg" and "Killer Joe," and soon to be seen in a mysterious role in "The Dark Knight Rises," has signed up to step in for Fanning as Princess Margaret. We're big fans of Temple (she's simply astonising in "Killer Joe," which hits theaters later in the year), and it's good to see her take a fairly high-profile lead role.
The film's apparently drawing comparison with "Roman Holiday," so we're not expecting anything particularly substantial, but it could be a sweet little lark, and is in fairly solid hands in Michael Hoffman ("Soapdish," the upcoming "Gambit"). Filming gets underway in the fall, so we should see this in theaters in 2013.
