It’s the recurring nightmare of high-minded modern parents of daughters. You ask your relatives to lay off the pink pinafores at the baby shower. You give your daughter Legos and soccer balls, not Barbies. You encourage her to play fire fighter and immerse her in Dora the Explorer videos. Then one Halloween rolls around, and your empowered, self-confident budding Marie Curie tells you that she wants to be…a princess. Call it nature or nurture, harmless fantasy or insidious indoctrination, but Hollywood is discovering that it still pays not to fight the royal urge. Following 2001’s $108 million–grossing The Princess Diaries, Hollywood has waved its wand and conjured a set of Cinderella stories for girls, including next month’s The Prince & Me and Ella Enchanted, as well as A Cinderella Story in July and a Princess Diaries sequel in August. That’s not to mention other fairy-tale projects and transformational stories like 13 Going On 30, in which a gawky teen is magically morphed into a fashion-plate magazine editor played by the perpetually miniskirted Jennifer Garner. We’ve come a long way, it seems, from the girls-kick-ass culture of just a few years ago
