The new trailer for Hulu’s The Princess wants you to know that Joey King is not your average dainty damsel. She’s the sort of groundbreaking princess who is strong-willed and adept at martial arts. You know the kind. She beats up big burly guys in armor! She’s not concerned with ladylike behavior and she absolutely does NOT need a man. She is a hashtag-girlboss princess.
Directed by Vietnamese filmmaker Le-Van Kiet, The Princess is a medieval action movie starring King as the titular royal. Her father has promised her in marriage to a cruel, controlling suitor played by Dominic Cooper, who seems like a real asshole in this movie but will always be the sunkissed hunk from Mamma Mia! in our hearts. King refuses to go through with the wedding, however, declaring, “I’m not a piece of property to be traded.” (#Girlboss!) Thus, she is shackled and locked away in a tower.
Based on the trailer, though, our heroine does not remain a prisoner for long. “These guys fucked with the wrong princess,” she narrates in a faux British accent as two scary-looking henchmen lumber into her chamber. She wastes no time in whacking one of them across the face with a rusty metal chain and tying up the other before sending him flying out the window with an acrobatic roundhouse kick. Cartoon-ish blood splatters across the screen and each blow lands with an icky squelch. Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” begins playing, because of course it does.
It turns out that after King refused to marry Cooper’s sociopathic prince, the jilted groom launched an effort to steal her father’s throne. It’s up to the escaped princess to defend her family, which means she will have to punch lots of other people and even swing a sword or two. Throughout the trailer, her long wavy hair becomes increasingly wild and messy to signify that she doesn’t care about vain princessy things like being pretty. What’s left of her wedding gown is caked with the blood of her adversaries.
There’s oddly little information available about the project (like character names, for example) beyond what’s offered in the trailer, but we can only hope it is executed with equally heavy doses of irony and fun considering how tired the damsel-not-in-distress trope is in This Year of Our Lord 2022. With its badass redheaded princess who defies quote-unquote conventional gender norms, the preview drew comparisons online to Shrek, a movie that came out–checks notes–21 years ago.
We’re not exactly sure who the target audience is for this film, but whoever you are, you can stream The Princess on Hulu beginning on July 1.
