Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are facing unusually blunt career advice after their first theatrical feature as executive producers struggled to draw moviegoers.
Royal commentator Kinsey Schofield told Page Six that she would advise the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to “disappear professionally for a little while,” dramatically reduce their announcements and concentrate on one compelling project backed by experienced people who can execute it.
Her comments followed the U.S. release of Cookie Queens, the Alysa Nahmias-directed documentary Harry and Meghan executive produced through Archewell Productions.
The film opened in 446 theaters on August 7 but finished outside the domestic top 10, while CatVideoFest 2026, a compilation of internet cat videos playing on 191 fewer screens, earned considerably more during the same weekend. The numbers give Schofield a fresh reason to question the couple’s entertainment strategy.
Schofield Says Another Rebrand Is Not the Answer
Schofield’s proposed strategy is built around doing less publicly rather than announcing another reset. She told Page Six that reputation recovery would be more likely to come from “less talking, fewer announcements and more execution,” arguing that a genuinely successful project could change the conversation more effectively than another publicity campaign.
She also urged Harry and Meghan to narrow their focus instead of trying to establish credibility across multiple areas at once. Her recommendation was to choose a lane, become good at it and develop projects capable of attracting audiences without depending primarily on the couple’s celebrity.
Schofield also argued that future entertainment projects should be able to stand apart from Harry and Meghan’s disputes with and departure from the royal family. In her view, a sustainable entertainment career requires audiences to care about their taste, ideas and storytelling even when the monarchy is not the central hook.
‘Cookie Queens’ Opened Behind a Cat-Video Compilation
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Cookie Queens follows four young Girl Scouts through the pressures, competition and excitement of cookie-selling season. Harry and Meghan joined the project as executive producers, and Meghan promoted it as personally meaningful because she was a Girl Scout herself and her mother, Doria Ragland, served as her troop leader.
The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January before Roadside Attractions acquired U.S. distribution rights. When it reached theaters, The Times reported that it had failed to make the weekend top 10 and had been outperformed by CatVideoFest 2026, despite the cat compilation playing in only 255 theaters compared with 446 for Cookie Queens.
Box-office trackers reported somewhat different opening-weekend totals. Early Box Office Mojo-based coverage put Cookie Queens at $327,797, or about $735 per theater. The Numbers currently lists a $354,262 opening weekend, equivalent to about $794 per theater.
The Numbers lists the cat compilation at $568,414 for the weekend from 255 theaters, giving it a substantially higher per-theater average as well.
The Distributor Had a More Positive View of the Opening
The distributor said the documentary performed well at specialty venues that traditionally show nonfiction films, as well as at multiplexes where current and former Girl Scouts helped drive attendance. Roadside said it was encouraged by the response and believed the film could continue finding audiences after its opening weekend.
Cookie Queens is a small documentary rather than a wide-release studio tentpole, and its production and distribution costs have not been publicly disclosed. The film itself has also been promoted around the four girls.
In a PEOPLE interview ahead of its release, Meghan said she and Harry were “proud and privileged” to support the project. She described the documentary as a meaningful depiction of an American tradition while pointing to her own childhood connection to Girl Scouts.