Is ‘Meet the Parents’ the Most Unnecessary Comedy Franchise of All-Time?

John Waters somehow can’t find funding for a new movie starring Aubrey Plaza, but Hollywood is apparently more than happy to throw millions of dollars at a fourth entry in the Meet the Parents franchise. At least we’ll finally have answers to all of those lingering mysteries from Little Fockers.  

Yes, Deadline is reporting that original stars Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Teri Polo and Blythe Danner are all in talks to appear in the movie, which is currently in development at Universal Pictures.

But we would like to offer a counterpoint: don’t. Don’t make any more of these movies. 

The first Meet the Parents worked because it had a very simple, extremely relatable premise: a character meets their romantic partner’s parents and feels both intimidated and embarrassed. Most adults have experienced some version of this scenario. And Meet the Parents took that shared experience to comedic extremes, by making Stiller’s girlfriend’s dad a former CIA interrogator. 

It wasn’t a wholly original concept. Meet the Parents was a remake of a low-budget 1992 indie comedy, which Universal bought and then promptly buried. They even blocked the original’s writer-director from distributing his film at all. It was as if it didn’t even exist.

Because 2000’s Meet the Parents was a huge box office hit, the studio quickly decided to milk it (you can milk anything with nipples) and released a sequel, Meet the Fockers, in which Stiller’s parents (played by Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand) clash with his future in-laws.

And just when we all thought that this particular dead horse had already been beaten into a fine powder, we got Little Fockers. Want to see Ben Stiller shove a hypodermic needle into the Oscar-winning star of Raging Bull’s out-of-control boner? Yeah, we didn’t either.

The biggest mistake these sequels made was assuming that audiences actually care about any of these one-dimensional characters. Meet the Parents worked because of its situational humor; the characters were merely archetypal audience surrogates. And the over-the-top embarrassing set pieces succeeded because they were tethered to a central premise that audiences could collectively identify with. Without that basic setup, witnessing Stiller’s character endure one ridiculously cringey ordeal after another has absolutely no emotional resonance. 

As one movie, it works. As a franchise, it’s just painful. 

Something similar happened with The Hangover series. The first movie had a tight, accessible central premise, which took a relatable scenario (having too much to drink with your friends) to comedic extremes. But because it made a ton of money, we got two sequels that abandoned any semblance of credibility or relatability in favor of nonstop gross-out gags.

Who knows, maybe Meet the Parents 4 (Teenage Fockers?) will prove us wrong. On the other hand, De Niro’s recent comedy filmography isn’t so encouraging.