Meet the Parents
Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.
Meet the Parents opened on October 6, 2000, directed by Jay Roach — fresh off the Austin Powers films — and built on a simple, sturdy premise borrowed from a little-seen 1992 independent film by Greg Glienna and Mary Ruth Clarke: a nervous boyfriend, a weekend at the girlfriend's family home, and a father who cannot be charmed. Ben Stiller played Greg Focker, a Chicago nurse ready to propose to Pam (Teri Polo); Robert De Niro played Jack Byrnes, her retired-CIA father, a human lie detector with an actual lie detector in the house. De Niro spoofing his own tough-guy iconography — administering a polygraph in the study, delivering "I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me?" over breakfast — was the joke the whole movie ran on, and it never missed.
The film became the fall 2000 comedy: a $28.6 million opening weekend, $166.2 million domestic and $330.4 million worldwide against a $55 million budget, which it earned back in eleven days. Its gag vocabulary went instantly public — the "circle of trust," Mr. Jinx the toilet-trained cat, the lost luggage, Owen Wilson's insufferably perfect ex-fiancé — and the Focker surname itself became a running institution. Jim Carrey, involved in early development, had suggested the name; the MPAA questioned it until Universal documented that real Fockers exist.
Two sequels stretched the joke across the decade — Meet the Fockers (2004), which brought in Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand and grossed $516 million worldwide, and Little Fockers (2010), which added another $310.7 million. But the original weekend at the Byrnes house is the one people still quote at every nervous boyfriend heading into a first dinner with the parents.
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