Merry Switchmas.
The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star (2021)
A priceless relic is stolen from identical royals Queen Margaret and Princess Stacy, who enlist the help of their sketchy look-alike cousin Fiona Pembroke to retrieve it.
rating 6/10 User rating 460 votes 67% ❄ Christmas Connection
The Princess Switch 3 is set entirely in the Christmas season, with a plot revolving around recovering a stolen Christmas relic and a royal countdown to the holidays. Snow, festive decor, and holiday balls frame every scene. The whole machinery of the movie, its fake kingdoms, its stolen artifacts, its improbable heist, runs on Christmas.
Where to Watch
Our Review
The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, released on Netflix on November 18, 2021, operates on the logic that if one Vanessa Hudgens was good and two were better, three must be the natural conclusion of a law of physics nobody had previously discovered. Queen Margaret, Princess Stacy, and Lady Fiona Pembroke are all played by the same woman, in the same scenes, which required three body doubles and a production schedule where director Mike Rohl filmed each character's movements separately before stitching them together. The result is either the most ambitious Netflix Christmas movie ever made or the most deranged one. Possibly both.
The Plot, Which Is Technically About a Heist
A priceless Christmas relic, the Star of Peace, has been stolen. Margaret is in political hot water. Fiona, the scheming cousin who got her own redemption arc in the second film, is now an unlikely ally. Stacy, the American baker turned princess who started this whole franchise in 2018, is back as the moral center. Together, the three women track down a jewel thief across what the film insists are the kingdoms of Montenaro and Belgravia but are in fact Scottish country estates, shot entirely in Scotland between December 2020 and March 2021.
The heist framing is a genuine attempt to do something different with the formula, and it mostly works. Fiona getting a love story of her own, handled by Remy Hii with more charm than the script quite deserves, is the single smartest creative decision the trilogy made in its final chapter.
What It Takes to Play Three People at Once
Hudgens has described the multi-character work as something that "never got easier" across the trilogy, even as she got more comfortable with the logistics. Each character required a distinct accent: Stacy's natural American cadence, Margaret's received pronunciation English (which Hudgens flagged as the most demanding, noting there is nothing worse than a bad RP accent), and Fiona's mid-Atlantic lilt, which Hudgens has said started as an accent she "put on for fun."
Three body doubles stood in for her during the triple-character scenes: Charlotte Coggin for Stacy, Alexa Lee for Fiona, and Rebecca Wong for Margaret. The doubles studied Hudgens' specific gestures for each character so the visual continuity would hold when the shots were cut together. It's production work that goes largely unnoticed when it succeeds, which, in this film, it usually does.
The triple-character scenes are the film's best trick. They're also, if you stop to think about it, genuinely technically impressive for a Netflix holiday movie shot during a pandemic in Scottish winter.
Scotland Doing Overtime as Fictional Europe
Hopetoun House, Newbattle Abbey, Gosford House, Barnbougle Castle, Borthwick Castle, and Dundas Castle all appear in the film, dressed and redressed to look like different European royal settings. The Scottish location scouts clearly earned their fees. The production design team's job of making the same country look like two different fictional ones requires a level of commitment that the film, somewhat gamely, delivers on.
There is something charming about Scotland quietly hosting the entire Princess Switch universe. The country has become its own character across the trilogy without ever getting named credit.
Netflix Christmas Movie as Its Own Genre
The Princess Switch series helped establish the specific grammar of the Netflix Christmas romantic fantasy: fictional European kingdoms with English-language royals, improbable character doublings, elaborate formal balls, and a warm-hearted resolution in under 90 minutes. By the third film, the franchise knows exactly what it is and leans into the self-awareness without tipping into parody.
Is it great cinema? No. Is it competently made, genuinely festive, and exactly the right length? Yes. The Christmas relic plot gives the movie more forward momentum than the second film managed, and Fiona's evolution from antagonist to co-lead is one of the better character arcs in the franchise. Hudgens clearly enjoys all three of these women, and that enjoyment is contagious enough to carry the film past its more improbable moments.
The franchise stopped here. When asked about a potential fourth character in a fourth film, Hudgens said, "We're already at max outrageous here with three characters." A reasonable position, and probably the right ending.
Fun Facts
Filming began in Scotland in December 2020 and wrapped in March 2021, making it one of the few major Netflix productions to shoot through the heart of the winter pandemic lockdown period.
Hudgens required three separate body doubles for scenes featuring all three of her characters simultaneously: Charlotte Coggin (Stacy), Alexa Lee (Fiona), and Rebecca Wong (Margaret).
The body doubles were required to study and memorize Hudgens' specific hand gestures and physical mannerisms for each character so that the visual continuity would hold across the stitched-together shots.
Director Mike Rohl filmed each character's scenes one at a time, letting Hudgens complete one character's movements entirely before switching to the next, a process he described as allowing her to handle her workload "in small packages."
Hudgens identified Margaret's received pronunciation English accent as the hardest of the three to master, saying "there is nothing worse than a bad RP accent." Fiona's accent, by contrast, originated as one she "put on for fun" in her private life.
The film was shot entirely in Scotland, using at least six separate Scottish estates and castles to portray the fictional kingdoms of Montenaro and Belgravia, including Hopetoun House, Borthwick Castle, and Dundas Castle.
The Princess Switch 3 carries an IMDb score of 5.6 out of 10, making it roughly in line with the franchise average, though Netflix never released viewership data that would suggest the audience cared much about critic scores.
When a reporter asked Hudgens whether she would consider playing a fourth character in a potential sequel, she replied, "We're already at max outrageous here with three characters, we're just going to keep it at that." No fourth film has been announced.
Cast
