Where to start with this thing…
First of all, if you have not seen The Boss Baby, forget everything you think you know about The Boss Baby. It is not merely an old E*TRADE talking business infant commercial strained to feature length. It is a weird, weird thing.
The original picture book the title and concept came from was simple enough—a demanding baby in a suit as metaphor for a newborn taking over the lives of parents and older siblings. Just a cute little gift to give at a baby shower.
The movie strays wildly from that simple premise. It is some kind of bonkers sci-fi spectacle with an incredibly complicated mythology. In it, babies are all created at BabyCorp, with more serious-seeming babies taken into the company as employees. (Puppies are also designed and manufactured in a corporation; this goes really deep.) The hired babies are given special formula that keeps them babies while granting them the brain development of an adult, so that they may act as corporate saboteurs under the cover of babyhood. It’s convoluted, bizarre nonsense—less a cute metaphor than an unhinged conspiracy theory.
If that adaptation was putting a hat on a hat, The Boss Baby: Family Business is a straight-up milliner.
In this inscrutable trailer for the sequel, not-quite-brothers Tim and Ted (the name later adopted by the child formerly known as Boss Baby) have become estranged. Reuniting for the holidays, they come to learn the secret revealed in the coda of Boss Baby: Tim’s daughter is also a Boss Baby. Relatively normal enough so far, yeah? Makes enough sense as a sequel.
Well, now there’s an evil old man secretly training babies to behave badly. So our new Boss Baby wants to take her father and uncle undercover into the neon-lit, geodesic dome in Paris where the evil old man is for some reason doing this. To do so, Tim and Ted will simply take another BabyCorp formula, this one with the ability to reverse aging back to their original Boss Baby models. But it’s not going to be easy, because the dome is filled with an army of baby ninjas and apparently at least one horse. If the odd flavor feels familiar, it’s because the sequel comes to us from the original screenwriter, who has yet to remove his brain tumor.
The Boss Baby: Family Business is set to hit theaters in March, giving us all plenty of time to catch up on the canon of the four seasons of Boss Baby: Back in Business on Netflix.
