Meet The Parents 4 Has To Change One Big Thing Up

Meet the Parents 4 is officially in the works, but the belated sequel needs to make a big change to one of its longest-running elements. 2000’s Meet the Parents introduces Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) as he visits the parents of his girlfriend Pam Byrnes (Teri Polo) on her sister’s wedding. Greg’s plan to propose to Pam at the wedding is complicated by Pam’s extremely intrusive and protective father, Jack (Robert De Niro).

The popularity of Meet the Parents spawned two sequels, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, in 2004 and 2010, and despite the long time-span since the last entry of the series, the hilarious familial comedy of the franchise certainly lends itself to one more outing. That is, if Meet the Parents 4 modifies the series formula in one essential way. Put simply, Meet the Parents 4 needs to finally drop the conflict and distrust between Greg and Jack.

Meet The Parents Has Taken Greg & Jack’s Rivalry As Far As It Can

When Greg first meets Jack in Meet the Parents, he’s as nervous and apprehensive as one would expect meeting the father of their significant other, especially with Greg’s plan to propose to Pam. However, Greg is soon in for a nightmare, with Jack bringing all of his CIA training and mindset to get into every nook and cranny of Greg and Pam’s relationship. Jack’s take-no-prisoners approach to vetting his daughter’s potential suitors leads to hilarious hijinks in Meet The Parents, but despite seemingly coming to terms with each other by the end, Greg and Jack had more issues to work out in 2004’s Meet The Fockers.

Greg’s free-spirited parents Bernie (Dustin Hoffman) and Roz Focker (Barbra Streisand) make Jack even more paranoid about Greg marrying Pam, especially when Jack comes to suspect Greg has fathered a son with their former housekeeper Isabel (Alana Ubach). Eventually, after plenty more comedic shenanigans, Greg, Jack, and their families clear the air in time for Greg and Pam to get married. That is the point at which Greg and Jack should finally have been able to set their differences aside and respect each other as in-laws. Unfortunately, 2010’s Little Fockers began to take things too far.

[Related: Happy Gilmore 2 Confirms Ben Stiller Is Returning for the Adam Sandler Sequel]

Jack Byrnes Has Become An Overbearing Bully To Greg

After six years, Greg and Pam have established a happy family of four in Chicago in Little Fockers, but the movie shows that Jack has changed little, if at all, since we last saw him. Obsessed with genealogy and his legacy in the family, Jack begins pressuring Greg to succeed him as the Byrnes-Focker family patriarch, or, as he dubs him, “the Godfocker.” The problem is that this also re-ignites Greg and Jack’s old conflict, with Jack becoming intrusively suspicious that Greg is being unfaithful to Pam and re-investigating their marriage, much to Greg’s justified chagrin.

It all eventually reaches a boiling point when Jack assaults Greg at his son’s birthday party, Greg simply doing his best to fight back without aggravating Jack’s heart condition. In an earlier Meet the Parents movie, this might have been a funnier crescendo for Greg and Jack’s antagonistic relationship, but by this point in Little Fockers, Greg and the audience have every right to be thoroughly vexed with Jack’s egotism and constant bullying of Greg. That doesn’t mean that another Byrnes-Focker family reunion is off the table, but Meet the Parents 4 needs to make a serious changes to Greg and Jack’s relationship that the franchise should made a long time ago.

Why Meet The Parents 4 Should Finally Make Greg & Jack Friends

What made Meet the Parents such a comedy hit was the inherent relatability of Greg’s situation as a man meeting his prospective in-laws for the first time. Meet the Parents certainly takes the scenario to a much more over-the-top and comedic extreme than it usually goes, but audiences could nonetheless find some exaggerated plausibility in the hilarious conundrums Greg finds himself in under Jack’s microscope. Meet the Fockers flipped the situation with Jack being in Greg’s shoes and still making everyone miserable in hilarious ways, but there comes a time when every joke has run its course. For Jack as an overzealous father-in-law and Greg as a timid son-in-law trying to earn his respect, that time was the end of Meet the Fockers.

Moreover, Greg and Jack’s rivalry has already been taken to its greatest extreme, with the two men in a knockdown, drag-out fight with each other. Even if there were more jokes to tell in Greg and Jack’s rivalry, they’d be coming with Greg and Jack having nowhere further to go as enemies without actually killing each other. The pair as friends, however, is something the Meet the Parents franchise has truly never attempted.

Greg and Jack actually coming to like and respect each other could set them up to be actual allies trying to navigate whatever comedic adventure Meet the Parents 4 puts them into. Jack could still bring his CIA background into play, but doing so in the interest of actually helping his son-in-law would finally show a new and fully humanized side to Jack, and could even turn he and Greg into a kind of father- and son-in-law buddy comedy duo. Wherever Meet the Parents 4 takes the Byrnes and Focker families, after a quarter century since they first met, it’s time for Jack to finally let Greg into the Circle of Trust.