David Farnor | On 01, May 2019

Amazon Studios has acquired the rights to Casey McQuiston’s Red White & Royal Blue.

The novel, which will be published next month by Macmillan, is the debut work from McQuiston, and has already been hailed by OprahMag as one of the “30 Best LGBTQ Books That’ll Change the Literary Landscape in 2019”.

The romantic comedy sees First Son Alex falls in love with Prince Henry of Wales after an incident of international proportions forces them to pretend to be best friends. First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince this side of the Atlantic. With his intrepid sister and the Veep’s genius granddaughter, they’re the White House Trio, a beautiful millennial marketing strategy for his mother, President Ellen Claremont. International socialite duties do have downsides — namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations. The plan for damage control: staging a fake friendship between the First Son and the Prince. Alex is busy enough handling his mother’s bloodthirsty opponents and his own political ambitions without an uptight royal slowing him down. But beneath Henry’s Prince Charming veneer, there’s a soft-hearted eccentric with a dry sense of humor and more than one ghost haunting him. As President Claremont kicks off her re-election bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations.

The novel sparked a bidding war between Paramount Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow, but Amazon won out at auction, adding the project to its growing sloate of original films. Ted Malawer will adapt the book for Amazon Studios, with Mike McGrath overseeing the project for Berlanti Productions.

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