If the title wasn’t already taken, Hulu’s upcoming dark fantasy action comedy film, The Princess, may have been called The Two Towers. Writers Jake Thornton and Ben Lustig revealed that their two greatest influences on the script were two iconic fictional towers, the fairy tale prison of Rapunzel, and the high-rise apartment block that provides the setting for Gareth Evans’ seminal 2011 Indonesian martial arts slug-fest, The Raid.
While the Grimm’s fairy tale Rapunzel is a no-brainer when it comes to inspiration for a modern fairy tale, The Raid, a movie about an elite squad of Jakartan police officers who fall into an apartment block-sized death trap while attempting to raid the home of a ruthless drug lord, may seem like it’s completely out of left field. But Thornton explains, in an interview with ScreenRant, that he and Lustig found the idea to be a hand-in-glove fit for a movie deliberately deconstructing the damsel in distress trope.
“Well, it’s funny that you say Rapunzel meets The Raid, because that was the initial thing. Me and Ben were waiting to go into a meeting two or three years ago and Ben literally said, ‘What about doing Rapunzel by way of The Raid, that being a princess at the top of the tower and fights her way down, rather than a group of policemen fighting their way up the tower?’ As soon as I heard it, I was like, “’Yeah, that’s a movie right there.’ What I loved about it was it was taking a trope, that being the princess held in a tower, but just doing something that you haven’t seen with it before. I think that was what immediately made us, made me, really excited and we just got on started writing it pretty much straight away.”
-Jake Thornton
the two influences make a powerful blend if The Princess trailer is to be trusted, combining the dreaminess of a storybook romance with what can only be described as an epic amount of fairy tale ass kicking.
Viewers can see if the combo is to their liking when The Princess debuts on Hulu this Friday.