National Treasure 3 Is Officially Happening, and Page 47 Might Prove Ben Gates Never Stopped Hunting

National Treasure 3 is finally happening. I know we have heard different versions of that sentence for nearly 20 years, and every time it hurt a little because I am a huge fan of these movies. I have watched the first two probably 20 times apiece, but this is the first update I get to share that actually looks and feels real.

There is a finished script that Disney actually likes. The original director is coming back. Nicolas Cage is expected to return as Ben Gates, and they are trying to bring back as much of the original cast as possible. But there was another part of this announcement that caught my attention too, because when you combine it with the mystery of page 47, I think National Treasure 3 could completely change what Ben Gates has been doing for the last 20 years.

Jon Turteltaub confirms National Treasure 3 has a script Disney wants to make

Jon Turteltaub, who directed both original films, revealed the news during a live recording of the National Treasure Hunt podcast in Philadelphia. He flat out told the audience it is happening. According to Turteltaub, they finally have a script he likes, Disney believes it is a movie they can make, and Jerry Bruckheimer has reportedly given it his blessing.

After all the rumors, abandoned scripts, and Nicolas Cage himself basically telling people to stop asking him about it, this is easily the most substantial update we have ever received. Turteltaub was careful with his wording though, calling the movie "Hollywood real," meaning something could still happen before cameras roll. Disney has not announced a release date, filming schedule, or complete cast.

Still, this is no longer somebody saying they have an idea or that another writer has been hired to attempt another draft. They have a script. They have a script the director and Disney want to make.

Turteltaub says the original cast is trying to return, and that matters after Edge of History was canceled

Turteltaub also said that to whatever extent possible, everybody is coming back, including Cage. That hopefully means Diane Kruger as Abigail, Justin Bartha as Riley, and Jon Voight as Ben's father, all of them part of it.

That really matters to me because I do not want National Treasure 3 to be a soft reboot where Ben Gates appears for 15 minutes and hands everything over to a new group of younger treasure hunters. We already tried the younger generation spinoff with Edge of History, and Disney canceled it after one season. This movie has taken almost two decades to happen. If we finally get it, we need Ben, Riley, and Abigail together, older, with the passage of time actually part of the story. That is what could make this thing work.

Page 47 has been an unanswered mystery since Book of Secrets in 2007

The original National Treasure arrived in 2004, and Book of Secrets followed in 2007. Together they made over 800 million dollars worldwide. These were not failures that Disney suddenly decided to dig out of a vault. We loved them, and they made money.

The second movie intentionally left us with one enormous unanswered question. At the end of Book of Secrets, the President asks Ben whether he looked at page 47 of the President's Book of Secrets. Ben confirms he did and describes what he saw as life altering. Then the movie ends without telling us anything else. We have spent 20 years hearing theories, everything from aliens to Roswell to the Kennedy assassination to lost American treasures.

My theory: page 47 could be a list of treasures that must stay hidden forever

I think we may have been looking at page 47 the wrong way. What if it is not a map showing Ben to another treasure, but a list of treasures that can never be found? After everything Ben did in the first two movies, I do not think the President showed him page 47 because America needed another treasure hunter. I think he showed it to Ben because America needed someone capable of finding these objects before anyone else and then making sure they disappeared forever.

Page 47 could contain a list of artifacts, documents, or historical discoveries considered too dangerous to release to the public, things that could destroy reputations, expose the government, or rewrite the accepted history of the United States. That would explain why Ben called it life altering rather than world changing or unbelievable. He said it altered his life. Maybe the moment he read that page, Ben Gates stopped being a public treasure hunter and secretly became the guardian of America's most dangerous historical secrets.

Edge of History dropped a clue that makes the theory more believable

Something from Edge of History makes this theory a little more believable to me. When Riley appears in the series, he hints that he and Ben have spent the last 15 years working on something extremely important, then says, "There are 47 reasons he can't explain it." It was obviously a page 47 reference.

But think about what that means inside the story. Ben did not read the page and immediately solve the mystery. He and Riley dedicated 15 years of their lives to whatever was written on it. One hidden city would not take that long. One map would not take that long. But an entire list of forbidden treasures scattered across the country, or the world, could. Ben and Riley may have spent all these years finding them, securing them, and keeping them away from people who would use them for power.

That gives National Treasure 3 a reason to make Ben the one being hunted

This gives the movie a perfect reason to bring back an older Ben Gates. It could begin with one of the objects from page 47 suddenly disappearing. Ben is the only person outside the presidency who knows what it is, why it matters, and where it has been hidden. Because he is secretly responsible for protecting it, he immediately becomes a prime suspect.

Instead of Ben racing another treasure hunter to a pile of gold, the entire country could be hunting Ben. The government thinks he stole the object, the villain believes he knows where the remaining treasures are, and Ben cannot defend himself without exposing page 47, so he has to reunite with Riley and Abigail to uncover who betrayed him.

Turteltaub says the script has to acknowledge political division without alienating the audience

That could also connect to something Turteltaub said about why the third movie has taken so long. He talked about America's current political division and said the movie cannot completely ignore that, although he does not want the story to alienate half the audience.

That could obviously go wrong very quickly. If National Treasure suddenly turns into a two hour political lecture, it is dead on arrival. Nobody has waited 20 years to watch Ben Gates argue about Republicans and Democrats. But page 47 does provide a way to explore a divided country without turning the movie into that. Imagine the missing treasure is a document that changes something fundamental about America's creation, and different groups want it because they believe it proves their version of history correct. The villain wants to release it, the government wants to destroy it, and Ben is caught in the middle. That feels like a National Treasure story, one that lets the film deal with the idea that Americans no longer agree on their own history while we still get to solve puzzles and secret rooms.

A wilder possibility: the Gates family may have created page 47 themselves

There is one more possibility I keep coming back to. Maybe the real secret of page 47 is that the Gates family has been involved in protecting these objects for generations. Ben has always believed his family's purpose was to find lost history, but what if certain members of his family were responsible for hiding it instead? The name Gates could become literal, generations of gatekeepers deciding which doors should open and which should stay closed.

If the Gates name is on page 47, it could reveal that one of Ben's ancestors helped create the President's Book of Secrets, explaining why the President trusted Ben specifically and why the Gates family keeps getting pulled into these events stretching from the American Revolution to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It could even change how we look at the treasure beneath Trinity Church in the first film, suggesting it was intentionally left behind as a test, with the clues designed not to hide it forever but to identify the one person capable of following them. Ben thought he defeated the puzzle. Maybe he just passed the test.

Where this leaves us

I do not know if National Treasure 3 will go this dark with it. There is always a chance page 47 ends up being a straightforward map to another lost city, which would be boring to me. But after nearly 20 years, we are going to get an answer. To me, the best version of this movie is not about Ben Gates coming out of retirement for another hunt, it is about discovering he never retired at all, that he has spent the last 20 years finding America's most dangerous treasures. That is what I am going with, but we will see. It is real, Nicolas Cage is coming back, the original director has the script, and Disney has given it a thumbs up.

What do you think is actually written on page 47?