Netflix is loading up its movie roster with some great new additions, and it just added a hilarious stoner comedy that Pineapple Express fans will love. Back in 2011, Pineapple Express co-stars Danny McBride and James Franco reteamed with the film’s director, David Gordon Green, for Your Highness, a fantasy-adventure film with major stoner comedy elements. Notably, McBride and Franco’s Pineapple Express co-star Seth Rogen did not join them for the film, but the cast did feature A-listers like Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, and Justin Theroux.
Your Highness follows two brother princes, Thadeous (McBride) and Fabious (Franco), who are entirely different from one another. Thadeous prefers a party lifestyle, while Fabious is the kingdom’s golden boy, always off on adventures. The pair are forced to set off on a rescue mission together when an evil sorcerer named Leezar (Theroux) kidnaps Fabious’ love, Belladonna (Deschanel). Along the way, they meet Isabel (Portman), a warrior intent on vengeance against Leezar for the death of her brothers. The film has some thrills and exciting moments, but it also has quite a lot of laughs and is certain to please fans of Rogen, Franco, and McBride’s other comedy movies, like Pineapple Express and This Is the End.
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Your Highness was written by McBride and Ben Best, with Green saying in a past interview that, for him, the film was just an opportunity to make something he wanted to see himself. “It was an entirely self-indulgent dream project for the 11-year-old in me and we made it relentlessly like that in a way that a very small group of people wanted to see,” Green said to a film festival audience back in 2011, per IndieWire. “Maybe you guys saw it, but not many others did.”
In a previous interview with Den of Geek, Green shared some insight into what inspired the film. “The movie as a whole is kind of- Our love, as eleven-year-olds, was everything from The Sword And The Sorcerer and Indiana Jones,” he said. “We just used to have a good time, eating popcorn, and if we could sneak into something more violent, like Conan The Destroyer, or Beastmaster and things like that, that would be the better for us. Danny and I, when we met in college, we bonded over that genre of sword and sorcery movies.”
Green continued, “They seemed to be neglected by most of our other film school chums, but we were really passionate about them. Not in the way that we wanted to do a spoof or a send-up, but we actually wanted to make one of those movies, put our stamp on it, and bring our sensibility to it, but work within the genre. As much as [Your Highness] was going to be categorized as a comedy, I hope people give it the opportunity to live as just a wild adventure movie.”
