Meet the Parents (film series)
Meet the Parents is a film series following the character Greg Focker as he interacts with his family and in-laws. The series is made up of three movies: Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers. A fourth film, titled Focker In-Law, is set to release in 2026. The series primarily stars Stiller, Robert De Niro, Teri Polo, Blythe Danner, Owen Wilson, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. The three films earned over $1.15 billion at the box office.
1992 independent film
Before the remake in 2000, Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke cowrote the original independent film, Meet the Parents, in 1992. Glienna also directed the film, wrote two original songs, and starred as protagonist Greg: a Chicago advertising agent who travels with his fiancée Pam Burns to meet her parents, Irv and Kay, for a weekend but sets off a series of accidents and causes the family to fall apart. Despite this, Greg alone survives: after Pam's sister Fay hangs herself, having accused Greg of wanting to cheat on Pam with her and framed him for her suicide, Irv attempts to shoot him but accidentally kills Kay and Pam before dying of a heart attack.Several years after the film's release, Universal Pictures purchased the rights to the independent film. After hiring screenwriter Jim Herzfeld to expand the script, a new version of Meet the Parents was filmed and released in October 2000.
Films
''Meet the Parents'' (2000)
''Meet the Fockers'' (2004)
''Little Fockers'' (2010)
''Focker In-Law'' (2026)
In December 2024, it was reported that Stiller, De Niro, Danner and Polo were in early talks to star in a new Meet the Parents film. On March 20, 2025, it was officially announced that a fourth Meet the Parents film was in development, with John Hamburg, who wrote each of the first three films, directing in addition to writing the film.On May 30, 2025, it was announced that the film would be released on November 25, 2026, and that Ariana Grande would join the cast. Additionally, Stiller along with De Niro, Danner, Polo and Wilson are confirmed to be reprising their roles. In late July, Skyler Gisondo was in talks to join the film. Later that month, it was announced that the film had been titled Focker In-Law.
Principal photography began on August 18, 2025, in New York City and is expected to last until November 4.
Legacy
The success of Meet the Parents was initially responsible for a 2002 NBC reality television show titled Meet My Folks in which a young woman's love interest, vying for her family's approval, is interrogated by the woman's overprotective father with the help of a lie detector machine. In September 2002, NBC also aired a situation comedy titled In-Laws. During the development of the sitcom, NBC called it "a Meet the Parents project" which prompted an investigation by Universal into whether NBC was infringing on Universal's copyright. Universal did not pursue any action against NBC, but neither show lasted more than one season. NBC and Universal merged on a corporate level two years later in 2004.On July 18, 2005, a regularly scheduled American Airlines flight from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport to San Juan, Puerto Rico, had to be diverted back to Fort Lauderdale shortly after take-off due to a bomb threat. The pilot turned the airplane around approximately 40 minutes into the flight after a flight attendant found a crumpled napkin that read "Bomb, bomb, bomb... meet the parents", a clear reference to the scene in which Ben Stiller's character repeatedly shouts the word "bomb" while being detained by airport security. The airplane was met by a bomb squad of the local sheriff's office as well as the FBI whose agents questioned the plane's 176 passengers about the note.