The Crown season 4 teased Diana’s wedding dress in trailers for months, so it may surprise some viewers that the show skips Charles and Diana’s wedding, but this was the right call for the Netflix series. Many fans of The Crown have been keenly awaiting Emma Corrin's depiction of Princess Diana and her relationship with Charles. Luckily for those fans, Diana appears early in season 4, episode 1, “The Gold Stick” – but Charles and Diana’s extravagant wedding is noticeably absent from episode 3, “Fairytale.” The scene with Diana in her wedding gown, preparing to leave for the wedding, cuts directly to the credits and the next episode picks up several months after the wedding.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Emma Corrin confirmed that the wedding was not depicted in The Crown for at least two reasons. First, the showrunners felt that recreating the wedding would not move the plot forward in any significant way. The wedding itself would likely not pose new narrative questions or reveal significant plot details, unlike Philip and Elizabeth’s wedding in The Crown season 1, episode 1, “Wolferton Splash,” which hinted at the tension in their relationship that would be explored later in later episodes. Second, the showrunners of The Crown don’t recreate anything simply for the sake of recreating it – even something as decade-defining as the luxuriant royal wedding.
While Charles and Diana’s wedding was indeed a major event, its popularity is exactly why The Crown was right to leave it out. On July 29, 1981, the wedding of Charles and Diana was broadcast live and – between both radio and television – it’s estimated that more than a billion people either watched or listened. Millions of people lined the streets of London to watch Diana’s procession in the iconic Glass Coach from Clarence House to St. Paul’s Cathedral, where 3,500 guests waited to observe the ceremony in person. Furthermore, recordings of the ceremony are readily available on YouTube. Since there wasn’t anything unique or crucial to the plot that The Crown season 4 could convey by depicting the wedding, a recreation of the decadent affair would have been redundant – and costly.
However, The Crown has been known to splurge on ornate replicas and lavish recreations, so the cost was probably not a significant factor that led to the omission of Charles and Diana’s wedding in season 4. Recreating royal weddings is expensive, but The Crown has done it before; the pilot episode depicted Philip and Elizabeth’s wedding, including a $35,000 replica of Elizabeth’s wedding dress. The total cost for the real-life wedding of Charles and Diana was around $48 million – in today’s dollars, that’s closer to $110 million. No expense was spared, especially when it came to Diana’s trend-setting silk taffeta and lace gown with 10,000 pearls, antique lace, and a record-breaking 25-foot train. The dress was recreated for a brief appearance in The Crown, worn in the show by Emma Corrin as Diana. Both the real-life version and recreation of the elegant gown are undeniably fit for a princess in her fairytale wedding.
Though Charles and Diana’s wedding was repeatedly described as “the stuff of fairytales," the couple had a highly publicized and tumultuous relationship from the time they met. The real-life couple has been a subject of gossip for nearly forty years, even after their divorce and the tragic death of Diana. While their bittersweet story was marred by rumors, both founded and unfounded, Charles and Diana’s wedding was widely celebrated among the people of England, who loved Diana and wanted desperately to believe in the fairytale that The Crown has now chosen to unravel by carefully selecting what to include - and what to leave out.