National Treasure Watch Order — What to Rewatch Before National Treasure 3

National Treasure 3 still doesn’t have a release date, a confirmed cast, or a plot synopsis — our full update on where the project actually stands covers that. What it does have is real momentum for the first time in years, which makes now a reasonable time to actually refresh the first two films rather than wait for a trailer to force the issue.

The Quick Routes

• Minimum route: National Treasure (2004) → National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007). This gets you everything a third film is almost certain to assume you remember.
• Complete route: Add National Treasure: Edge of History (2022–2023) if you want the most recent on-screen material in the franchise’s current continuity, even though Ben Gates himself never appears in it.
• Optional route: Nothing beyond the above. There’s no expanded universe of comics or games carrying essential canon the way some franchises have.

National Treasure (2004): What You Need to Remember

Ben Gates comes from a family that’s spent generations chasing a story about a Templar treasure hidden by America’s founders. Working from clues connecting Freemasonry, the Declaration of Independence and a set of Revolutionary-era landmarks, Ben — alongside tech specialist Riley Poole and National Archives conservator Abigail Chase — has to steal the Declaration itself to protect it from his former partner, Ian Howe, who wants the treasure for profit and doesn’t care what gets destroyed along the way. FBI agent Peter Sadusky spends most of the film chasing Ben’s team as a straightforward antagonist. The film ends with the Templar treasure found, Ian arrested, and Ben’s family name — his father Patrick had spent his life being mocked for believing the treasure was real — finally vindicated.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007): What You Need to Remember

Years later, rival treasure hunter Mitch Wilkinson produces a diary page implicating Ben’s ancestor Thomas Gates in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Clearing the family name again becomes the engine for a much bigger hunt: the legendary Lost City of Gold, Cíbola. The trail runs through Mount Rushmore and eventually requires Ben to do the thing the marketing built the whole movie around — briefly “kidnap the President” to get access to the President’s Book of Secrets, a classified record passed between administrations. Wilkinson, who spends the film in morally ambiguous territory rather than straightforward villainy, ultimately drowns in a flooded cave while letting the others escape. The team finds the City of Gold, and Wilkinson gets posthumous credit for the discovery.

What Page 47 Actually Established — and Didn’t

This is the detail worth being precise about, because it’s the franchise’s most durable unresolved thread. In the film’s closing scene, the President asks Ben to read Page 47 of the Book of Secrets as a personal favor. Ben does, calls it “life-altering,” and the two have a private conversation about it — off screen, with the audience never told what the page actually says. That’s a deliberate choice by the film, not an accident of pacing. Page 47 isn’t a mystery the story forgot to resolve; it’s a mystery the story built specifically to leave open.

Nothing officially confirmed about National Treasure 3 says Page 47 is the plot of the next film. Treat any specific theory about its contents as fan speculation until Disney or the filmmakers actually say otherwise.

Is National Treasure: Edge of History Required?

No — but it’s the most recent on-screen material connected to the franchise, and it’s worth knowing what it actually is rather than skipping it blind.

Edge of History is a Disney+ series that ran one season in 2022–2023, following Jess Valenzuela, a young treasure hunter uncovering her own family’s history two decades after the films. Nicolas Cage’s Ben Gates does not appear — he’s referenced, not shown — but Justin Bartha reprises Riley Poole in a mentor role, and Harvey Keitel returns as Peter Sadusky for the premiere, where the character is quietly poisoned and dies. Disney canceled the show after one season.

Whether the show is canon to a future National Treasure 3 is genuinely unresolved. An early script draft by Ted Elliott reportedly treated the series as canon, which would keep Sadusky dead going forward — but reporting on National Treasure 3’s current script hasn’t confirmed whether that draft is the one Turteltaub and Disney are now working from. If you want the full picture of where that stands, our National Treasure 3 update has the details. For watch-order purposes: skip it if you only care about the films, watch it if you want to be caught up on everything the franchise has produced since 2007.

Key Characters and Relationships Worth Remembering

• Ben Gates (Nicolas Cage) — treasure hunter, driven by clearing his family’s reputation across both films.
• Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) — Ben’s tech-savvy best friend and comic relief, present throughout both films and reappearing in Edge of History.
• Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) — National Archives conservator, Ben’s on-and-off romantic partner across the two films.
• Patrick Gates (Jon Voight) — Ben’s father, initially skeptical, drawn back into the family obsession in Book of Secrets.
• Peter Sadusky (Harvey Keitel) — FBI agent, antagonist in the first film, ally by the second, dead partway through Edge of History if that continuity holds.
• Mitch Wilkinson (Ed Harris) — Book of Secrets’ antagonist-turned-ambiguous ally, a more morally complicated foil than Ian Howe in the first film.

Where Book of Secrets Leaves Ben Gates

By the end of the second film, Ben has cleared his family’s name twice over, reconciled his parents, found a second legendary treasure, and — per the closing scene — been handed a piece of classified information he describes as life-changing but never explains to anyone, including the audience. That’s a genuinely open door for a sequel: not a cliffhanger in the conventional sense, but an unresolved personal thread that’s been sitting untouched for nearly two decades.

What’s Actually Confirmed About National Treasure 3

As of Jon Turteltaub’s August 21 comments at Philadelphia’s National Treasure Weekend, the project has a script Turteltaub and Disney both like — described by Disney as something that “sounds like a movie we can make.” That is real progress, and it is not a greenlight. There is no confirmed cast, no filming date and no release date. Nicolas Cage has not publicly confirmed his return, though Turteltaub has said the goal is to bring back the original cast “to whatever extent we can.” Our full update tracks every confirmed detail as it develops.

What’s Still Speculation

Don’t treat any of the following as established: a Page 47-centered plot, a specific villain or historical conspiracy, whether Edge of History is being treated as canon, who beyond Cage might return, or any release window. None of it has been confirmed by Disney, Turteltaub, or the film’s writers as of this writing.