As a wise Focker once said, "You can milk anything with nipples." But in the case of the Meet The Parents franchise, turns out you actually just need Ben Stiller playing a man called Gaylord Focker and Robert De Niro playing his ever-alert, ex-CIA Father-In-Law Jack Byrnes. And having already encompassed a whole trilogy — Meet The Parents, Meet The Fockers, and Meet The Parents: Little Fockers — to date, it looks like the time has come to enter Focker-Byrnes' circle of trust once again. Per Deadline's reporting, a fourth film in the franchise is in the works at Universal Pictures, with Stiller and De Niro in early talks to return for more farcical family shenanigans.
Plot details on the fourquel remain hush-hush, at least for now, but as well as De Niro and Stiller circling comebacks for this one, we do know that longtime franchise co-writer John Hamburg is on script duties, and that Teri Polo and Blythe Danner — who play Greg (Gaylord's given name) and Jack's respective wives Pam and Dina — are also in the frame to return here. Beyond that, we know precious little else about the project. With Little Fockers' ending having seen Jack approve his Son-In-Law to be the family's "Gregfocker", and then subsequently watched Greg rib him on YouTube, the door is wide open for more happy-unhappy-but-then-happy-again families in the latest sequel. Whether Owen Wilson, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, or Laura Dern will be back among the Fockers this time out is very much up in the air — but also, way to remind us how absurdly stacked the casts of these films has been.
For both Stiller and De Niro, a return to the Fockerverse will be a marked change in pace from their current projects. While Stiller has dabbled in family-centric comedy recently with festive offering Nutcrackers on Disney+, he's mostly been found behind the camera these days directing sci-fi workplace thriller Severance (whose Season 2 trailer just dropped!). As for De Niro, the Octogenarian Oscar winner has most recently been seen in Martin Scorsese's period crime epic Killers Of The Flower Moon, and is about to make his TV debut as a former US President in Netflix's Zero Day — neither of which are exactly lolathons. All the same, every day is Christmas Eve here at Empire HQ, and we live in hope that Meet The Parents 4 will join the pantheon of great comedy quadrilogies alongside the likes of American Pie, Madagascar, and Spy Kids.