Debra Martin-Chase: Last News

Angelique Jackson Seven years ago, pioneering film and TV producer Debra Martin Chase was thinking about leaving Hollywood. The first Black woman to ink an overall deal at any studio, she’d produced such genre-defining hits as “The Princess Diaries,” “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.” While getting projects about women and people of color off the ground was never easy, suddenly prospects were stagnant. “It was at a point where Hollywood just wasn’t interested,” she tells Variety, reflecting on the career crossroads from the living room of her apartment in New York, where she lives while her popular CBS series “The Equalizer” is in production. “You’d talk to people — particularly white men — and their eyes would just glaze over.”

EXCLUSIVE: Kennedy Ryan’s bestselling novel Before I Let Go is in development at Peacock from UCP and Universal Television.

exclusively revealed that was officially in the works at Disney.The confirmation was welcome news to fans of the franchise who’ve been waiting almost two decades for the return of Anne Hathaway’s awkward high schooler-turned-monarch Mia Thermopolis, but rumors of another sequel have, of course, been swirling for years. Back in 2016, Garry Marshall, the director of the first film and its delightful follow-up The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, discussed the possibility of a third film, but plans were temporarily shelved following his death later that year.