In the long and illustrious history of Muppets Most Wanted, arrived in the spring of 2014, and while it wasn't quite as well-received as the previous film, it garnered its share of big laughs. Rather than a movie about the Muppets in general, like The Muppet Movie or The Muppets, it dropped the Muppets into a genre film in the tradition of The Great Muppet Caper. That film earned $80 million domestically.
Instead of a third movie, the next big Muppets project was a prime time TV series, also called The Muppets, which debuted on ABC in the fall of 2015. Conceived as an adult-oriented, behind-the-scenes workplace comedy in the tradition of 30 Rock, the series was hard-edged, cynical, and not especially funny. Critics savaged it along with a misbegotten pre-premiere marketing gimmick about Kermit and Miss Piggy œbreaking up and Kermit having a œnew girlfriend. Near-constant retooling wasn't enough to save the show, ed after one season.
What have the Muppets been doing since? Not a whole lot. There's no word of another movie or TV show in development, with the exception of a Muppet Babies reboot that's headed to Disney Jr. next year. The official Muppet Studio YouTube channel still puts out original videos on a weekly basis, but nothing on the level of that Bohemian Rhapsody video that went viral a few years ago. The Muppet Vision 3D show continues to play at Disney's Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, but if one were to make a list of the 10 or 15 most prominent characters at the Disney theme parks, it probably wouldn't contain any Muppets.
So where do the Muppets go from here? They're still under the umbrella of Disney, but with the same company owning everything from Star Wars to Marvel to Pixar to the core Mickey/Goofy characters, while also currently rebooting similarly half of its animated canon, the Muppets don't appear to be among Disney's highest priorities at this particular moment. And sure, the Muppet Babies are coming back, but the Muppet Babies are kind of their own thing and not exactly the Muppets themselves. A documentary called Muppet Guys Talking, featuring Frank Oz and several other old hands, is set for release this fall, but that's not an official Muppet Studios project.
Could there be another incarnation of The Muppet Show, as a 70s-style variety show? It hasn't been tried in quite awhile and it's a certainly a formula that's stood the test of time. Another movie, perhaps? We already had 21st century analogues to The Muppet Movie and Great Muppet Caper, so why not something akin to the greatest Muppet film of all, The Muppets Take Manhattan? And speaking of Broadway, there have been whispers for years about a Muppet-based musical. Why wouldn't Disney, certainly no stranger to the Great White Way, pursue that?
When my son, now 7, was 2, he was obsessed for a time with Kermit, thanks to a steady diet of YouTube clips of the famed frog from The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and the 80s movies. How will the young kids of the future discover the Muppets? Those are the questions that remains for Disney to answer.
The Matt Vogel era of Kermit the Frog could go any number of directions, and chances are the Muppets are one of those things that's cyclical in popularity - the characters are all pretty timeless, and they'll never truly go away. After all, they've overcome much worse.