For two decades, Disney treated National Treasure as a property it could grow beyond its star — a theme-park-ready brand of founding-father puzzle-boxes that ought to run without an expensive lead. When the studio finally tested that theory, spinning it off into the Disney+ series Edge of History with a younger, cheaper cast and no Nicolas Cage, the show lasted a single season. The lesson looks like the oldest one in the franchise business: some IP is just an actor. Director Jon Turteltaub’s word that a third film is, as he put it, “finally real” is less a greenlight than a correction.

Speaking at a live taping of the National Treasure Hunt podcast in Philadelphia, and as The Hollywood Reporter relayed, Turteltaub said he and Disney have signed off on a script and are working to reassemble the original cast. “It’s finally real,” he told the room. “Now, it’s Hollywood real, meaning things could happen.” Cage is expected back as Ben Gates, with the director promising that “to whatever extent we can, everyone’s back.”

That everyone once added up to a genuine phenomenon. The original and its sequel, Book of Secrets, turned a gloriously preposterous premise — a treasure map inked on the back of the Declaration of Independence — into more than $800 million worldwide for Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and seeded a fan culture devoted enough that Philadelphia now stages an entire National Treasure Weekend around the films. What the series never got was a third chapter, stranded for years in the gap between Cage’s price tag and Disney’s appetite.

The delay, Turteltaub suggested, was not only financial. A franchise built on shared reverence for the Declaration and the Founders is a harder sell in a country that no longer agrees on its own mythology, and he framed the new film as trying to speak to those divisions without alienating half of its audience. It is an unusually candid admission for a popcorn adventure: the obstacle to a third National Treasure was less a plot than a national mood. No start date or release window has been set.

Turteltaub, characteristically, kept even the good news contingent. “Nic gets hit by a bus, there’s no National Treasure 3,” he told the crowd. “If I get hit by a bus, there’s probably a National Treasure 3.” A script Disney likes, a star in talks and a director wagering his own mortality against Cage’s — nineteen years after the last treasure hunt, that is what “finally real” looks like.

Tags: Disney, Nicolas Cage, franchise revival, Jon Turteltaub, National Treasure 3

Disney’s National Treasure spin-off flopped without Cage — the third film is ‘finally real’

More Like This

Goldstein has a finished ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ sequel — and no studio math that greenlights it

Anne Hathaway scraps a finished ‘Princess Diaries 3’ script to make Mia a queen, not a princess

Anne Hathaway Cries Becoming a Disney Legend — the Princess Diaries Kid Now Has a $2 Billion Year

Netflix and Disney+ Chase Free Tiers as Their Price-Hike Playbook Stalls

Del Toro converts ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ to 3D by hand, making its re-release an anti-AI manifesto

Timothée Chalamet made Wonka a hit. Now he’s the reason the sequel is stalled

Discussion