Jesse Eisenberg is going for the hat trick with Now You See Me 3. The long-planned third installment in Lionsgate’s magic-based heist franchise about magician-trickster thieves known as the Four Horsemen — initially illusionist J. Daniel Atlas (Eisenberg), mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), escapist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher), and quick-fingered magician Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) — could materialize in front of the cameras before the end of 2024.
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“Yeah, I did [read the script]. Hopefully it will happen in the next six months. I think it will, it seems like it will. Yeah, it’s really great,” Eisenberg told Collider, adding that the Now You See Me 3 script “celebrates intelligence, and it’snon-violent but exciting.”
“It’s so weird to see that because itsounds so obvious, and it sounds like that would be common, but it’sactually quite uncommon to have a movie that’s this franchise, thisHollywood-style movie that’s really just about teamwork andintelligence, rather than just violence,” Eisenberg continued.
The Louis Leterrier-directed first film — featuring a starry cast that included Mark Ruffalo, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine — conjured up $351 million at the global box office in 2013. A sequel, directed by Jon M. Chu, added Daniel Radcliffe and Lizzy Caplan to the ensemble (sans Fisher) and made away with $335 million in 2016.
“I think it’s because they hired, at the beginning, great actors,” Eisenberg said of Now You See Me‘s success as an original, non-IP-based franchise starter. “I’mincluding myself, but really I’m making the point that they hired like10 great actors, and it’s the kind of thing when you watch a movie andthe plot is complicated, and you’re trying to follow it, but at thecenter of it is people who are alive on screen, who seem to be bringingthemselves, who seem to be having fun improvising within the thing. Itjust makes it so much more fun. There are a lot of movies like that nowwhere movie companies realize if [they] can hire really great actors forthis plot driven, Hollywood-style movie, it’ll give it some soul andsome life.”
Lionsgate formally announced Now You See Me 3 in November with Eisenberg’s Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less director Ruben Fleischer at the helm. “We reimagined Now You See Me with Ruben Fleischer, who is an absolute master at shepherding franchises,” Joe Drake, then-chairman of Lionsgate’s motion picture group, said of the Venom and Uncharted filmmaker during an investor’s call.
Drake added that NYSM3, described as a “fresh take” on the sleight-of-hand heist, was gearing up to start production in spring 2024. A release date is TBA.
