The creators of the hit royal drama The Crown have decided to make a major change to the show's season six ending after urging from Netflix bosses to take the royals' story further and leave the door open for a sequel series.
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Airing next year, season six was set to conclude in 2002, which is the year in which the Queen lost both her sister, Princess Margaret and her mother. However, it's now been said that it will now end in 2005 with Prince Charles' wedding to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
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The source said the change has been made to mark the start of a new era for the royal family, with the marriage being used to signify the end of one turbulent period in the Windsors' story and the start of another.
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As such, it leaves the possibility that the show could explore Prince William and Prince Harry's own marriages in a sequel open, despite the fact that showrunner Peter Morgan has previously said he has no plans to dramatise recent events in royal history.
Discussing the upcoming final two seasons back in 2020, he said that he does not have plans to cast anyone to play Harry and Meghan - or any of the modern royal family - but teased that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's story could be told in other, less literal ways.
"Meghan and Harry are in the middle of their journey, and I don't know what their journey is or how it will end," he told The Hollywood Reporter at the time, adding that he didn't want to include modern-day storylines because "to write about them would instantly make it journalistic".
"There are plenty of journalists already writing about them. To be a dramatist, I think you need perspective and you need to also allow for the opportunity for metaphor. Once something has a metaphorical possibility, it can then become interesting. It's quite possible, for example, to tell the story of Harry and Meghan through analogy and metaphor, if that's what you want to do."
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Name-checking both Edward VII's wife Wallis Simpson and Princess Diana, he explained: "There've been wives that have been married into the Royal family that have felt unwelcome and that they don't fit in. So there are plenty of stories to tell without telling the story of Harry and Meghan."
Meanwhile, there has also been talk of a potential prequel series. While Netflix has declined to comment on the news, it's said that the streamer is in early-stage conversations to bring to life a new series that will chronicle the life of the royals in the first half of the 20th century.
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