THE REAL TRICK TO MOVIE MAGIC

A LOOK AT WHY THE NOW YOU SEE ME FRANCHISE CONTINUES TO ENDURE

- STORY: ALEXIS SOLOSKI / NYT

Magic is fake. Everyone knows this. The rabbit waits under the table; the card is forced. There are bogus thumbs, palmed coins, false-bottomed cups. Movies are also just pretend, tricks of light and sound. Computer graphics, artificial intelligence technologies, even a clever camera angle can counterfeit just about anything. Magic on film? That's a double fake, a disaster. Or it should be.

Yet the magicians of Now You See Me, the improbable 2013 magic-action-thriller-comedy-heist flick, and its 2016 sequel, Now You See Me 2, have now returned for a third film, Now You See Me: Now You Don't. Tada! As a villain in this new film declares, magic is camp, pure cheese. Can camp and cheese really sustain a franchise? Did audiences really clamour for a third film (in theatres) introducing more magicians, more razzle-dazzle and a room that turns upside down? Apparently, yes.

Edward Ricourt, one of the writers of the first movie, has a theory for why it all works. “We want to be fooled,” he said during a recent video call.

Ricourt, a New York City native, grew up watching street performers in Washington Square Park and Central Park. Later, as a fledgling screenwriter in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, he began to imagine a script in which street magicians teamed up for a Robin Hood-style heist plot with magic as both the means and the misdirection.

Ricourt didn’t know that much about magic, so once the script was written, in collaboration with Boaz Yakin and Ed Solomon, magic consultants were hired to flesh out tricks that could be integrated into the script. These consultants also came to New Orleans to teach some tricks to the actors: Jesse Eisenberg as an illusionist, Woody Harrelson as a hypnotist, Isla Fisher as an escapologist, Dave Franco as a sleight of hand expert.