Meet The Parents - Legacy

Legacy

The success of Meet the Parents was initially responsible for a 2002 NBC reality television show entitled 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 entitled 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.

In 2004, Meet the Fockers was released as a sequel to Meet the Parents. Directed again by Jay Roach with a screenplay by Jim Herzfeld and John Hamburg, the sequel chronicles the events that take place when the Byrnes family meets Bernie and Roz Focker, Greg's parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. The producers intended for Greg's parents to be the opposite of the Byrnes' conservative, upper class, WASPy demeanor; to that effect, producer Jane Rosenthal explains that "Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand were our dream team." Meet the Fockers proved to be another financial success grossing $280 million domestically and $516 million worldwide, outperforming Meet the Parents by a large margin and finishing as the fourth highest grossing film of 2004.

In February 2007, Universal Studios announced that they would be making a second sequel in the franchise, titled Little Fockers. The film was to be directed by Roach with the screenplay written by Larry Stuckey, Roach's former assistant. The sequel brings back De Niro, Stiller, Polo, Danner as well as Hoffman and Streisand.

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.