In the year 2000, audiences were treated to the surprise romantic comedy hit that we've come to know as Meet The Parents. For almost 20 years, this story of a male nurse being terrorized by an ex-CIA operative has been known as one of the biggest, most well-remembered comedy gems of modern times. And yet, after some clever editing and the right soundtrack / title cards, the Jay Roach directed film looks like a thriller worthy of the Lifetime channel. Watch the re-cut trailer to a scarier version of Meet The Parents below.
This thematic conversion comes from CineFix, as they've re-cut the trailer as part of their Trailer Mix series. The end result looks like a thriller in which a woman is caught in the crossfire between two highly unstable men: her mysterious fiancee, and her over-protective dad. Insert some footage of backdoor dealings, car chases, and a "confession" scene or two, and you've turned a romantic comedy with the same story beats into a psychological thriller that could have put Ben Stiller's career on a wildly different path.
Of course, there's one obvious issue with the thrilling re-cut of the Meet The Parents trailer, as the video makes it kind of hard to tell who's supposed to be the true psycho here. While this new trailer starts off feeling like Robert DeNiro is an overly paranoid father who'll do anything to save his beautiful daughter, everything shifts towards the middle of the trailer, putting more of a psychotic spin on Ben Stiller's frazzled fiance. Though if you want to get creative about it, one could assume that the twist to Meet The Parents' re-cut is the fact that both father and son-in-law are psychos, ready to duke it out through any means possible.
What makes this newer trailer even funnier is comparing it to the original Meet The Parents trailer, which can be seen below.
Meet The Parents, with the right hands to re-write it, can very easily be turned from a comedy of errors into a battle for the ages. In fact, now that we've seen this alternate trailer, we're kind of sad that this version doesn't exist in this universe. But somewhere, out in the multiverse, there's a thrilling version of Meet The Parents directed by Christopher Nolan that has us on the edge of our seats. If you'll excuse us, we're going to try and find a way to that dimension, only because we don't want to miss the geo-political assassination thrillers that are the Zoolander franchise, courtesy of director Clint Eastwood.
