Here's Why National Treasure 3 Never Happened
149Disney’s National Treasure: Book of Secrets debuted back in 2007. The sequel to 2004’s National Treasure, it reunited director Jon Turtletaub with stars Nicolas Cage, Justin Bartha, Diane Kruger and Harvey Keitel. And more importantly, it was a hit, making more than $450 million worldwide (and by August 2009 had made at least another $100 million on home video). And while Turtletaub and producer Jerry Bruckheimer would periodically tease another installment, beginning as early as 2008, one never materialized. And now we might know why we never got a third National Treasure adventure.
Collider’s own editor-in-chief Steve Weintraub got to chat with Mulan producer Jason Reed, who was the Production Executive at Disney for the National Treasure movies. And he got Reed to open up about what happened to the third movie in a way that nobody has before.
“I tried my damnedest to get National Treasure 3 up. I love those movies. I worked on those from inception,” Reed said. At the time he worked closely with Bruckheimer on projects like Pearl Harbor, King Arthur, Déjà vu, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and, of course, the National Treasure films. (This was back when Bruckheimer had a lucrative deal with Disney following the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The relationship soured after a string of big budgeted underperformers and was completely killed by the costly bomb The Lone Ranger.)
Reed then offered his analysis of why a subsequent film never went forward: “What I felt happened is even though the movies were extremely successful and had a really strong fanbase, it’s a movie that gets brought up all the time, the company was never able to capitalize on it as a franchise. It was more of a movie with a sequel and National Treasure 3 would have been another sequel.” So, unlike, say, the Pirates of the Caribbean, which is very clearly a capital-F franchise or something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Star Wars, National Treasure was a run-of-the-mill, humdrum movie with its own run-of-the-mill, humdrum sequel. The kind of movie Disney used to make pretty regularly (hello, Another Stakeout and Three Men and a Little Lady!) but not so much anymore.
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