Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, have plenty of name recognition. Their latest film project suggests that getting people to recognize the names and getting them to buy tickets are two very different things.
Archewell Productions released the documentary “Cookie Queens” over the weekend, following four Girl Scouts through the highly competitive world of selling Girl Scout cookies. According to box-office figures cited by the New York Post, the movie brought in approximately $354,000 from 446 theaters.
Then came the cats.
“CatVideoFest 2026,” a 70-minute collection of internet cat videos, earned approximately $569,000 while playing on only 255 screens.
For Harry and Meghan, those numbers produced an uncomfortable comparison. Their documentary was shown on nearly twice as many screens and still finished well behind a movie built around cat videos.
Royal commentators quickly seized on the result as evidence that the couple’s considerable celebrity does not automatically translate into commercial demand.
“The extremely underwhelming box office is a clear indication that, yet again, unless they are bashing the royals and sharing inside stories, secrets and betraying the privacy of the family, there isn’t much they have that is at all in demand nor popular,” royal commentator Hilary Fordwich told the Post.
“Meghan certainly doesn’t have the commercial pull she has so desired,” she added.
Harry and Meghan generated enormous international attention after stepping away from their roles as working members of the British royal family. Their subsequent interviews, Harry’s memoir and their Netflix documentary series all benefited from intense public interest in their departure and allegations concerning life inside the monarchy.
The harder question has been whether that audience follows them when the subject has nothing to do with Buckingham Palace.
Royal commentator Richard Fitzwilliams pointed to several of the couple’s projects, including “With Love, Meghan,” the Invictus Games series “Heart of Invictus,” and “Polo,” while questioning whether their ventures have demonstrated sustained audience appeal independent of their royal connections.
“The world knows who they are, but isn’t curious enough to tune in,” Fitzwilliams said, before taking aim at Meghan’s As Ever lifestyle brand and its assortment of products.
“So it’s all about buzz and nothing else, save their link with real royalty,” he argued.
Royal commentator Kinsey Schofield made a similar distinction, suggesting Harry and Meghan once commanded automatic curiosity simply by putting their names on a project.
“There was a period when simply attaching their names to something guaranteed enormous curiosity,” Schofield said. “I’m not convinced that’s true anymore.”
And then there are those cats.
“There’s no getting around the optics of finishing five places behind a 70-minute compilation of internet cat videos,” Schofield said. “Hollywood can forgive a lot, but being beaten by ‘CatVideoFest’ is the sort of indignity that writes its own punchline.”
The comparison is particularly striking on a per-theater basis. Based on the reported totals, “Cookie Queens” averaged roughly $794 per theater, while “CatVideoFest 2026” averaged approximately $2,231. In other words, the cat compilation generated almost three times as much revenue per theater.
Those figures alone cannot establish why audiences did or did not attend a particular movie. But they do provide another test of how effectively Harry and Meghan can convert their fame into an audience for projects unrelated to royal controversy.
“Meghan certainly has enormous name recognition, but I think at this stage it’s fair to ask how much of that is fame and how much is infamy,” Schofield said. “There’s a significant difference commercially.”
Someone might eagerly read the latest Meghan headline without having any interest in spending money on something merely because Archewell produced it. As Schofield put it, “That doesn’t mean they’re going to buy a movie ticket because her name is attached to the project.”
That leaves Harry and Meghan confronting a more ordinary Hollywood problem than the extraordinary royal drama that initially followed them to California: producing something audiences actively want.
Schofield said the curiosity surrounding the couple’s royal exit has diminished in the six years since their departure, leaving much more practical questions.
“What can you produce? What can you sell? Can you build an audience around something that isn’t royal drama?” she asked.
Her proposed solution is not another publicity offensive.
Speaking to Page Six, Schofield suggested Harry and Meghan should “disappear professionally for a little while,” reduce their announcements and concentrate on a single strong project backed by experienced people capable of delivering it.
“Reputation recovery is possible, but I don’t think it comes from another rebrand or another glossy publicity campaign,” she said. “Less talking, fewer announcements and more execution.”
Her final prescription was even simpler: “They need to stop treating their celebrity as the product and start creating products strong enough to survive without their celebrity.”
