Several Iconic Movie Trilogies Leaving Netflix in the Next Three Days

Three of the most successful film trilogies in recent memory are leaving Netflix on January 1, 2023. Responsible for more than $2.5 billion in combined box office, the Austin Powers, Rush Hour, and Men in Black series are all vacating the streaming giant in the coming days. They will join big hits like Sex and the City: The Movie and its sequel, as well as four Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films (the original trilogy, and the CGI-animated TMNT). In some cases we can easily guess where the movies will land next, in others we aren't quite so sure.

Austin Powers is a franchise that centers around a flamboyant, 1960s spy (played by Mike Myers) who was frozen in time and reawakened in the 1990s. The fish-out-of-water comedy centered on how Powers -- a James Bond parody right down to the insane gadgets and bald, cat-stroking arch-nemesis -- had to adjust to a more "politically correct" world, where his hypersexualized personality and sense of humor weren't always welcome. A fair amount of comedy also came from the mix of Austin's daffy personality and hypercompetence at his job. He would seem like a total moron -- right up until the moment he was about to win.

Austin Powers came out in 1997 and was an instant pop culture phenomenon. New Line Cinema quickly followed it up with a pair of sequels -- 1999's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and 2002's Austin Powers in Goldmember -- as well as an avalanche of merchandise. There has been talk of a fourth Austin Powers movie a number of times in the years since, but nothing has materialized. The series is also available on HBO Max right now, which makes sense givne that it hails from the Warner Bros.-owned New Line, but given the chaos at Warner Bros. Discovery these days, it's always possible executives will see Austin Powers as a piece of IP that's more profitable to let someone else rent for a while longer.

That's the same story as Rush Hour, a franchise also released by New Line. That trilogy lacks the pop culture footprint that Austin Powers had, but has an even longer lifespan. The first movie released in 1998, and it took until 2007 to get the third and final installment into theaters. The series, which stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, pitted a motormouthed LAPD officer (Tucker) who is given the unwanted responsibility of working with a Hong Kong police inspector (Chan) on a high-profile kidnapping case. As tends to be the case with adversarial buddy-cop movies, the two grew much closer by the end of the first movie, and would be forced to work together for years after, with the acrimony and culture clashes that defined the first one still part of their dynamic.

Rush Hour was enough of a success that, even without Chan and Tucker, Ted Lasso and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence revived it for TV in 2016. It ran for only a single 13-episode season before being shuffled off the air, but that still doesn't mean the franchise is done. Earlier this month, Jackie Chan said that Rush Hour 4 is in development.

Last but not least, Men in Black. This series is so huge, and has had such recent installments, that it really doesn't need an introduction. Launching in 1997, Men in Black continues to be one of Sony's most valuable franchises, with movies, an animated series, comics, video games, and merch. The first movie centered on Will Smith's character "J," a new recruit to the Men in Black, a super-secretive government organization that oversees alien activity on Earth and keeps it secret from the public at large with the help of an older agent, "K" (Tommy Lee Jones). The first sequel came in 2002, followed by a third movie in 2012, in which J had to team up with a younger version of K played by Josh Brolin.

Diminishing returns on the series resulted in an attempt to reboot it in 2019 with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson, but in spite of the great chemistry those two have shown in the Thor movies, the Men in Black revival didn't take.

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This one is a little more up in the air. Sony doesn't own its own streaming platform, and there isn't anywhere else that Men in Black is currently streaming. Keep your eyes on ComicBook.com, and we'll let you know as soon as we find out where the series lands.

* This article was originally published here