Cookie Queens—executive-produced by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry—has so far had the couple’s best ratings, though some reviews have also made criticisms of the film.
The movie, directed by Alysa Nahmias, follows four Girl Scouts, aged 5 to 12, as they navigate the intense six-week cookie-selling season, setting ambitious sales goals. While Harry and Meghan are both executive producers, it has been Meghan giving interviews to promote the project and citing the particular emotional significance to her as a former girl scout.
The Sussexes had significant commercial success with their first Netflix project, the 2022 biopic Harry & Meghan, but later shows did not do so well commercially. Only one Netflix project was rated above 45 percent and that was Heart of Invictus, at 86 percent, but that was off the back of only a handful of reviews.
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As of Monday, Rotten Tomatoes had Cookie Queens on a 94 percent overall rating, higher than any other project the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were involved in. The movie hit theaters on Friday.
What the ‘Cookie Queens’ Reviews Say
Rotten Tomatoes recorded 45 positive reviews and three negative ones, giving Cookie Queens an overall score of 94 percent. Across all the reviews that gave the film a numerical rating, the average was 7.3 out of 10.
The movie got its first reviews after a screening at Sundance Film Festival and these were some of the most positive. There was an additional flurry of more recent articles since it hit theaters on Friday.
Despite its Rotten Tomatoes score, not all were positive with Variety saying in its August 8 headline that the film was “Too Much of a Reality-Show Ramble.”
“The movie unfolds entirely in the present and never gives you even a fleeting sense of the past, of how Girl Scout Cookies rose in prominence to become the phenomenon they are today,” critic Owen Gleiberman wrote. “(In case you’re wondering, they were launched in World War I to raise money for U.S. soldiers.)
“But once the credits are over, the movie gets down to its single-minded theme and obsession: how Girl Scout Cookies, once a quaint piece of Americana, have lurched into their late-capitalist phase, with the girls who sell them vying to become champions by fashioning themselves into 12-year-old entrepreneurial go-getters.”
Gleiberman appeared to feel the film’s focus on the girls’ real life stories left it feeling light on substance, suggesting “it keeps punching up the action with an annoyingly cute musical score.” He felt it was “so focused on each girl’s odyssey of selling that there’s virtually no other dimension to it.”
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle’s headlines read: “Cookie Queens Girl Scout documentary is as staged as it is sweet.”
Carla Meyer wrote: “The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Meghan, produced the movie, which contains the same level of spontaneity as their other media projects. That is to say, next to none.”
The Boston Globe was more positive: “Cookie Queens is an adorable Girl Scouts documentary made with surprising honesty and more than a little bite. It puts some hard truths in the figurative mouths of babes, sneaking them in with a spoonful of sugar rather than a sledgehammer.”
How ‘Cookie Queens’ Compares to Meghan and Harry’s Other Projects
Reviews were far more critical of a number of their other projects, however. Their initial Netflix biopic Harry & Meghan, was a commercial success, sailing to the top of the Netflix download charts
Critics told a different story. Variety ran the headline: “It’s Well Past Time for Harry and Meghan 2.0.” In the piece Andrew Wallenstein wrote: “Given that they’ve beaten this horse to death, perhaps this one-trick pony is due for the glue factory.”
With Love, Meghan also struggled in the eyes of critics. Among numerous negative reviews, Vulture ran the headline: “Meghan Markle Pioneers New Frontiers in Unrelatability.”
Kathryn VanArendonk described the show as “an utterly deranged bizarro world voyage into the center of nothing, a fantastical monument to the captivating power of watching one woman decorate a cake with her makeup artist while communicating solely through throw-pillow adages about joy and hospitality.
“It is painfully defensive. Meghan comes across as constantly worried about what people will think, and because of it, the show can neither flaunt her unusual life, nor can it embrace legitimate ordinariness.”
One project with a Rotten Tomatoes score to rival Cookie Queens was Harry’s documentary about his Invictus Games adaptive sports tournament for veterans, Heart of Invictus.
On Rotten Tomatoes, it got a critics’ score of 86 percent but that was from seven reviews, somewhat less than Cookie Queens’ 48. Its average rating was 7.3 out of 10.
Similarly, Apple TV mental health docu-series The Me You Can’t See, which Harry made with Oprah Winfrey in 2021, was well-reviewed with a Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score of 87 based on 15 reviews. It had an average rating of 6.7 out of 10.