If a ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Movie Were Produced, What Would It Look Like?
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With the 11th season of RuPaul’s Drag Race almost at its end, we think it’s about time for World of Wonder to consider making a RuPaul’s Drag Race movie.
The RuPaul’s Drag Race movie wouldn’t be a two-hour long mini-season of the reality drag competition. Instead, we envision a comedy caper film similar to the screwball 1963 comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or its 2001 madcap successor Rat Race, in which the funniest and fishiest Drag Race queens all scatter to find the lost crown of Empress José Sarria.
Sarria is the real-life legendary founder of the Imperial Court, one of the world’s oldest, largest and most glamorous LGBT organizations. The Court raises funds for charity annually and internationally through opulent coronation balls that bring together genderbent pageant queens, leather fetishists and Paris is Burning-style ballroom performers (in short, the kind of folks who love Drag Race).
The RuPaul’s Drag Race movie would start with Mama Ru learning about the crown’s whereabouts from her longtime squirrel-friend Michelle Visage. Because RuPaul is having a facelift (something he discusses often on his podcast What’s the Tee?), he’s unable to claim the crown for himself.
The crown is immensely valuable and could give each queen the life of their dreams. So Ru spreads the news to all of his girls, causing them to form ragtag teams to snatch the crown for themselves.
Naturally, each queen wants the crown for their own reasons — one wants to buy a shitload of cosmetics, one wants to start their own media empire, one wants to pay off their ungodly credit card debt, one wants to hire an immaculate hustler.
So the rest of the RuPaul’s Drag Race movie would show the teams fighting and flying for the crown — hitchhiking, lip-syncing and maybe even sex-working their way across America, taking every form of transportation: planes, trains, horseback, piggyback, hot air balloon.
They could incorporate scenes inspired by the show’s most memorable mini-challenges, like a visit to Tuckahoe Women’s Prison, a round of drag queen wrestling or a situation requiring “drag on a dime.”
The biggest question would be whether RoLaskaTox — Season 5’s trio of Roxxxy Andrews, Alaska Thunderfuck and Detox Icunt — and The Heathers — Season 3’s Raja, Manila Luzon, Delta Work and Carmen Carrera — would band together for the caper.
Outside of them, the queens could form teams based on location — all the Southern queens, the Chicago queens, the New York queens, the Puerto Rico queens — or maybe their teams are formed from different seasons and make up different skills, placing comedy and lewk queens together.
Granted, half the fun would be seeing the queens scheming and sabotaging one another, perhaps even the sisters on their own teams. But the RuPaul’s Drag Race movie would end with a group bringing the crown back to RuPaul, and Ru emerging from the shadows — crown on head — looking drop-dead amazing.
The real winner of the RuPaul’s Drag Race movie would be the fans who’d love seeing the queens turning out their most sickening looks in a whizz-bang comic race, but if World of Wonder highlights former Drag Race sponsors in the film too (come on, Interior Illusions Lounge!), the money could make them all winners as well.
