While the world waits patiently for another Nancy Meyers movie, Netflix provided her fans with the next best thing. On Friday, the streaming service reunited the cast of Father of the Bride with Meyers for an event organized to benefit World Central Kitchen. Called Father of the Bride Part 3 (ish), the special—which debuted on the Netflix YouTube and Facebook pages—included original stars Diane Keaton, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Kieran Culkin, Kimberly Williams-Paisley, and George Newbern as well as a quartet of new additions: Florence Pugh, Ben Platt, Alexandra Shipp, and Robert De Niro. Meyers herself received sole writing and directing credits.
That’s a shift from the original, beloved comedy and its sequel: both movies were co-written by Meyers with her ex-husband, Charles Shyer, who also directed the features. Neither Netflix or Meyers, who has been teasing the continuation of the Father of the Bride story for weeks on her Instagram account made mention of Shyer in the announcement on Wednesday.
Released in 1991, Father of the Bride was a remake of the 1950 film of the same name and won both critical and popular acclaim. After it became a sleeper hit at the box office, a sequel followed in 1995. The original stars Martin and Keaton as George and Nina Banks, well-meaning parents who try to get through their daughter’s wedding; the sequel, set four years later, deals with the pair becoming grandparents (and also welcoming their own new daughter to the family).
In the new short film, Pugh plays George and Nina’s grown daughter, Platt plays their grandson, and Shipp stars as Culkin’s significant other. The plot revolves around a surprise wedding between Culkin and Shipp. (De Niro plays Shipp’s dad.)
Meyers’s last film as a director was 2015’s The Intern, but she’s remained firmly ensconced in the zeitgeist this year. Back in February, she wrote a piece for the New York Times’s Modern Love column about her post-marriage relationship with Shyer. In April, weeks into the coronavirus pandemic quarantine period, the writer and director caused a bit of a social media stir when she posted an image of her kitchen to Instagram.
“I’ve never shown my house on Instagram because I don’t know, I just prefer to keep that private I think. But through all of this, I really didn’t care much about that anymore, so I was heading up the kitchen stairs carrying my phone and I just snapped it and posted it,” she told Vanity Fair about the image. “I didn’t give it that much thought. I wasn’t expecting the reaction it received. My kitchen was built in 1998. It’s not all new and shiny and if you watch HGTV like I do, you know the kitchens on those shows are always fairly big and always the big reveal of the episode. So, I was surprised by my 22-year-old kitchen getting so much attention.”