entrancementquik

Night at the Museum is a trilogy of fantasy-comedy films beginning in 2006 and ending in 2014. All three films, based on the children's book The Night at the Museum by Milan Trenc, are directed by Shawn Levy and written by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon. Starring Ben Stiller as a museum night security guard named Larry, the films also star an ensemble cast featuring Owen Wilson, Robin Williams, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan, Patrick Gallagher, Rami Malek, Mizuo Peck, Mickey Rooney, Bill Cobbs and Dick Van Dyke.

• 1Films
• 3Reception

Films[edit]

Night at the Museum (2006)[edit]

When Larry Daley (Ben Stiller), a divorced father who can't seem to keep a job for more than a week, applies for a job at the American Museum of Natural History, he is assigned as a night guard. However, a seemingly easy job turns out to be a wild ride when he finds that an ancient spell has caused the 'inhabitants' of the museum to come to life.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)[edit]

Three years after the previous film, several of the exhibits are transferred to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and Dexter the monkey steals the tablet of Ahkmenrah, Larry must break in and team up with his old friends, and new ally Amelia Earheart to get it back from Ahkmenrah's resurrected evil brother Kahmunrah before morning.

Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)[edit]

Five years after the previous film, Larry discovers that the tablet of Ahkmenrah's magic is failing. So he, his now-teenage son Nick, along with Teddy Roosevelt, Sacagewea, Jedediah, Octavius, Dexter, Attila the Hun, and a new caveman figure named Laaa (who looks like Larry) travel to a fictional version of the British Museum to undo the curse with the help of Ahkmenrah's parents, and the narcissistic Sir Lancelot of Camelot before the tablet's magic disappears forever.

Television series[edit]

In August 2018, CEO of 20th Century Fox Stacey Snider announced that a television series based on Night at the Museum is currently being developed. With the acquisition by Disney, it is increasingly likely that it will appear on Disney+.

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

Critical and public response[edit]

Cast and characters[edit]

Note: A gray cell indicates that character did not appear in that film.

Crew[edit]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

1. ^'Night at the Museum (2006)'. Box Office Mojo.
2. ^'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)'. Box Office Mojo.
3. ^'Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb (2014)'. Box Office Mojo.
4. ^'Night at the Museum franchise'. boxofficemojo.com. IMDB. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
5. ^'Night at the Museum'. rottentomatoes.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
6. ^'Night at the Museum'. metacritic.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
7. ^ ^abc'Cinemascore'. Cinemascore.com. CinemaScore. Retrieved February 7, 2015.
8. ^'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian'. rottentomatoes.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
9. ^'Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian'. metacritic.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
10. ^'Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb'. rottentomatoes.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
11. ^'Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb'. metacritic.com. Retrieved February 8, 2015.

LOS ANGELES — After wrapping his last shot of Robin Williams in “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” in May, Shawn Levy, the movie’s director, joined Ben Stiller, its star, in an on-set tribute to Mr. Williams.

The film’s crew responded with a standing ovation. Caught on video, the applause went on for two minutes.

“It was the last scene of his last movie,” said Mr. Levy, who described the moment during an interview on the 20th Century Fox lot here last month.

“We did not know it was the end” of Mr. Williams’s film work, Mr. Levy said, “but we did know it was the end of the franchise.”

Set for release in the United States on Dec. 19, and around the world on dates that stretch into March, “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” is the third and last entry in a comedy series that has surprised even its makers with its durability and international appeal.

The original film, which was directed by Mr. Levy and also starred Mr. Stiller, opened in 2006 to $30.4 million in first-weekend ticket sales. It went on to collect over $250 million at the domestic box office — remarkable in a business whose hits routinely score more than 40 percent of their sales within days of opening.

More striking, both “Night at the Museum” and its sequel, “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian,” released in 2009, joined a rare group of comedies — including Warner Bros.’ “Hangover” sequels and Universal Pictures’ “Little Fockers” (distributed in some territories by Paramount Pictures) — that play even better abroad than at home.

Asked where the “Night at the Museum” movies did well, Paul Hanneman, Fox’s co-president of worldwide marketing and distribution, said: “Everywhere.” The first two films, combined, have had about $1 billion in global ticket sales. Mr. Hanneman’s co-president, Tomas Jegeus, said sales perhaps lagged in China, but it was expected to be more receptive this time, as viewers there warm to broad comedy.

The strong foreign sales owe much to a stratagem used by Mr. Levy and Mr. Stiller in constructing the series, which was initially based on a screenplay by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, and a book by Milan Trenc. From the outset, they used its effects-friendly story — about museum displays that come to life — to showcase well-known actors in roles that usually were more full-blown vignettes than mere cameos.

“It was not about casting names, more about the best person,” Mr. Stiller said in an email.

“Secret of the Tomb” features Ricky Gervais, Owen Wilson, Steve Coogan, Dick Van Dyke, Rebel Wilson, Ben Kingsley and a performance by the now-deceased Mickey Rooney, among others (including one prominent surprise appearance). Members of that troupe have won, or been nominated for, at least 16 Oscars through the years.

“Any director’s greatest gift is to cast an ensemble; to intuitively know how actors will simmer together,” Mr. Kingsley said, also via email.

In this case, the actors very much simmered around Mr. Williams, who committed suicide in August, as Mr. Levy was finishing his first cut.

Much like Heath Ledger, whose death in 2008 rocked Warner’s then-unfinished “The Dark Knight,” in which he played the Joker, Mr. Williams had emerged as an obvious co-star of “Secret of the Tomb,” with billing just behind Mr. Stiller.

After working three weeks on the first “Night at the Museum” film and one week on the second, Mr. Williams spent three months with the third, on sets in London and Vancouver.

His character, a bold, gun-toting Teddy Roosevelt, had grown into what Mr. Levy now calls “the soul of the franchise” — a presidential father figure who more or less keeps in line the rowdy cave men, gladiators, dinosaurs and cowboys who otherwise populate the film.

“ ‘Hey, look at where we are and look at what we get to do,’ ” Mr. Levy recalls an exultant Mr. Williams saying, as the group shot for a week in the British Museum in London.

“He loved it, you could tell by the outtakes,” said Mr. Gervais, who spoke by phone from London. Mr. Gervais, like Mr. Williams, has appeared in all three “Night at the Museum” films.

Left with the delicate task of featuring Mr. Williams without seeming to exploit him, Mr. Levy decided to keep the film largely intact. Only two sentences were cut from Mr. Williams’s work, because, Mr. Levy said, they were too “personally haunting” in seeming to foreshadow his death. What the lines were, he declined to say.

(There are a couple of other posthumous performances from Mr. Williams: He played the lead in “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas,” an independent film made in 2013 that was released in a small number of theaters last month, and he did voice work in “Absolutely Anything,” which was directed by Terry Jones and has not yet been released in the United States.) Fox has not shied away from selling Mr. Williams; he is prominent in the film’s trailer, for instance. In the movie, his big turn involves a mind-bending tumble through the wormholes and blind alleys of an M. C. Escher graphic. Shot against a green screen to allow for computer-generated effects, the scene was five months in the planning.

Over the years, such close attention to each set-piece has brought dozens of A-list actors to the “Museum” films, for fees low enough to keep the price tag for “Secret of the Tomb” at less than $150 million — a relatively modest amount for a globe-spanning Hollywood sequel.

Yet Mr. Levy had already decided, with Fox, to frame “Secret of the Tomb” as a farewell to the franchise, presumably leaving all involved to go out on top.

And that farewell theme, prominent throughout the movie, left Mr. Williams with some “goodbyes,” mostly scripted long before his death, that may draw more tears than are usual for a broad comedy.

Among those is a final horseback salute. Plus, a few words have been added to the end credits.

The final lines came to Mr. Levy while lying awake one night, he said.

“In memory of Mickey Rooney,” reads the scroll.

“And for Robin Williams: The magic never ends.”