More Austin Powers?

There's a rumor going around the web that Mike Myers is prepared to inflict more Austin Powers upon us. Let's do an anatomy of a rumor here: DarkHorizons links to a story at FirstShowing.net that quotes from an interview Myers did with RottenTomatoes (and my cousin's girlfriend said her mother's college roommate heard from her sister's ex-fiance...) where he mentions the possibility. And now I'm doing my duty as a spy blogger and reporting it here too, thus contributing to that morass of potential misinformation. Anyway, there isn't much meat to the actual story. Basically, when asked while doing press for Shrek 3 if there would be another Austin Powers movie, Myers said “There is one that we have an idea about. The only thing I will say is that it's entirely from Dr. Evil's point of view." It's unclear just how serious he was being; FirstShowing thinks he could have been joking.

When the first movie in the series, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery came out, I loved it. It put the spotlight on a genre I (clearly) love dearly: the Sixties spy movie. He borrowed and stole from everywhere, and I loved seeing all the references to even some really obscure spy flicks. And it was genuinely funny. Then the two dreadful sequels came along, each one worse than the last, continually shifting the focus from clever spy parody to stale potty humor. And then the impressions started, and soon you couldn't turn around without some idiot saying, "Yeah, baby, shagadelic!" or some such nonsense, and that really killed the franchise for me. It's even, sadly, impacted my enjoyment of the original. So would I want to see another? Not really. But if you're gonna do it, focusing on Dr. Evil is probably the best way to go. Austin's kind of been done to death, and Dr. Evil was always the best character, so that could actually be interesting. If it happens, I think the idea could have the potential to actually be good and outshine the execrable The Spy Who Shagged Me and Goldmember.