I remember a time when Grace of Monaco was an Oscar hopeful in everyone’s eyes. It opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, Nicole Kidman was playing a screen legend sure to garner some attention, Olivier Dahan was directing (whose La Vie En Rose garnered Marion Cotillard an Oscar), and The Weinstein Company was sure to position it like they did The Imitation Game. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. After receiving scathing reviews from just about everyone out of Cannes and no one wanting to touch it with a ten-foot pole, Variety reports the film will premiere on Lifetime on May 25. You read that right. Lifetime.
A film that opened Cannes will now be playing on the same station that houses the Lindsay Lohan-starring Liz & Dick and the Grumpy Cat movie. I can hardly believe it myself. Lifetime may not have the same stigmatization to others than it does for myself, but almost anyway you look at this, it is bad news. Grace of Monaco has a reported $30 million budget [source], features A-list actors, and is going to the channel that mainly entertains sad housewives and the pets of people who accidentally leave their TVs on.
If I were a Weinstein, I would have tried to send it straight to Blu-ray and DVD, VOD, or Netflix. And perhaps they did try. Maybe they thought Lifetime would bring in the biggest audience they could get. Who knows? It is just interesting to see how an Oscar hopeful can sink so low.
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Grace Kelly (Kidman), a former Oscar winner and mother of two, had already spent six years as the monarch of a European nation when the retired starlet was called upon to save Monaco from an escalating situation regarding its standing as a tax haven, with French leader Charles de Gaulle giving her husband, Monaco’s Prince Rainier III (Tim Roth), six months to reform its tax laws.
