Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are back in Britain.
Six years after their spectacular departure for North America — complete with multimillion-dollar media deals, a California mansion and ambitions to build something resembling a global entertainment empire — the Sussexes have returned with little to show for it.
Their return will of course offer more and heightened stories of royal family tensions.
But there is another fascinating part of the story: what Harry and Meghan’s US experiment has inadvertently demonstrated about one of the most competitive industries on earth.
Hollywood.
Fame and connections can get you through the door but cannot make people press play.
No audition required
There is a comforting mythology that entertainment is a meritocracy.
It isn’t.
Hollywood has always been awash with nepotism, connections, inherited wealth and lucky breaks.
Being born into the right family can get your script read.
A famous surname can get you into rooms that thousands of more talented people will never enter.
But connections mostly solve one problem: access.
They cannot guarantee demand.
And few people in modern entertainment history arrived with more access than Harry and Meghan.
When they moved to California in 2020, they weren’t struggling actors waiting tables between auditions. They were two of the most famous people on Earth.
Netflix reportedly signed them to a deal with a potential value of around US$100 million. Spotify reportedly offered another US$20 million.
They had global name recognition, enormous press interest and the kind of instant distribution most aspiring producers spend careers trying to acquire.
Hollywood didn’t make them climb the ladder.
It dropped them onto the roof.
Then the audience looked up
Harry and Meghan’s early successes were enormous.
The Netflix documentary Harry & Meghan generated 81.55 million viewing hours in its first four days. Harry’s memoir Spare sold more than 1.4 million copies across the UK, the US and Canada on its first day — a record for its publisher.
But people were overwhelmingly interested in Harry and Meghan as royals. Or, more specifically, royal rebels.
The commodity was proximity to the Palace: what happened behind closed doors, what William allegedly said, how Meghan was treated and why they left.
The Royal Family — and especially its dirty laundry — was effectively the intellectual property.
Once that reservoir of revelation began running dry, the real market test began.
Meghan’s proposed animated children’s series Pearl never made it to air, cancelled by Netflix while still in development.
The first season of With Love, Meghan attracted 5.3 million views; season two fell to just two million, ranking 1,224th among Netflix programs during the second half of 2025. Harry’s Polo failed to crack Netflix’s Top 10.
Spotify ended its relationship with the couple after one 12-episode season of Archetypes.
Their blockbuster exclusive Netflix arrangement has since been replaced by a far less committed first-look deal. [7][8][5]
This is where Hollywood becomes brutally clarifying.
The industry is not a meritocracy.
Nepotism can get you cast. Money can buy production values. Connections can secure distribution. Power can keep you in the room.
But none of them can create demand.
Currencies that matter
Oprah built a media empire.
The Kardashians converted notoriety into an astonishingly resilient commercial ecosystem.
Gwyneth Paltrow built Goop.
Jessica Alba built the Honest Company into a consumer brand valued at more than US$1 billion at its peak.
Reese Witherspoon built Hello Sunshine around a clearly defined female audience and eventually sold a majority stake in a deal valuing the company at roughly US$900 million.
Dolly Parton’s passing last week is a powerful reminder of how talent and extraordinary business acumen can create an empire that endured for more than six decades.
Their ventures differ wildly, but they proved the same thing: celebrity is only the starting capital.
To turn attention into a business, you need a distinct point of view, a clear understanding of your audience and the discipline to keep creating something people want.
But there is another kind of demand in Hollywood.
Demand for power
The ambition Harry and Meghan brought to America wasn’t unprecedented.
When the Sussexes signed with Netflix, the obvious comparison was Barack and Michelle Obama, whose Higher Ground Productions had signed its own mega deal with the streamer two years earlier.
Harry and Meghan’s aspirations were explicitly described at the time as following a similar model.
But there was a crucial difference.
The Obamas built a production company whose product did not need to be the Obamas.
Their venture demonstrates another currency always at work in the entertainment industry and beyond: power.
Real power is something bigger than celebrity.
A former US president and first lady possess political, cultural and institutional influence that has enduring value to media companies.
Power can sustain access even when audience demand is niche.
Hence why their production company Higher Ground endures.
American Factory won an Oscar.
Leave the World Behind attracted 121 million views in just over three weeks.
Rustin and American Symphony earned Academy Award nominations.
Harry and Meghan had extraordinary fame — and proximity to power, for a while.
But proximity is not power. And fame is not an audience.
In Hollywood, you need one or the other: the power to make things happen, or an audience that wants to see what you make.
They had neither.
And therein lies their fundamental miscalculation.
Harry and Meghan wanted independence from the institution that made them famous while continuing to monetise the world’s fascination with being inside it.
For a while, that worked spectacularly well.
But grievance has a limited number of seasons.
Eventually every entertainment brand faces the same question:
What are you offering me now?
The people who successfully turned celebrity into enduring businesses didn’t simply remain famous.
They built something that could outlast the story that made them famous in the first place.
Harry and Meghan never did.
The Palace was the product
Which makes their extended return to Britain strangely fitting.
There may be perfectly good personal reasons for it.
Their children are beginning school in Britain, Harry retains deep charitable ties here and some form of family reconciliation may yet follow.
But there is an irony to where they find themselves six years after leaving.
They went to the US to escape an institution they believed constrained their potential.
Hollywood gave them something few people ever receive: almost unlimited capital, access, distribution and attention with which to discover what their potential was worth without it.
And the answer turned out to be uncomfortable.
The institution they were trying to transcend wasn’t merely holding them back.
It was what the market was buying.
Kosha Gada is a tech entrepreneur and CEO of Memories Technologies Pty Ltd. She is also a broadcast commentator on US and international current affairs, appearing live three nights a week on News24
Read related topics:Prince Harry Meghan Markle