The summer movie season kicked off in May with a new Marvel movie, as usual. Plenty of trailers have been dropping in front of this early summer’s hit releases like Thunderbolts* or Lilo And Stich, previewing other titles that will be debuting through August, as well as a few big fall movies. But while it’s a bit too early to expect full blown from holiday-season entries like the sequels to Zootopia or Avatar, two movies have gone ahead and gotten the ball rolling on fall promotion. One is a short teaser for Predator: Badlands, a Disney-owned franchise’s return to movie theaters after the beloved Prey (and about to be further promoted by an animated movie coming to Hulu in June). The other, surprisingly, is a full trailer for Now You See Me, Now You Don’t, the third movie in the magic-heist franchise that you could be forgiven for disappearing from your mind entirely. (It’s somehow racked up 13 million views on YouTube since its release last month.)

It’s not that people didn’t like Now You See Me, which is indeed about a quartet of professional magicians who pull off a series of revenge/justice-themed tricks. Back in 2013, it made a robust $350 million worldwide as an original heist thriller in a summer full of sequels and prequels; and, as of this writing, it’s sitting atop the Netflix Top 10 Movies chart. Its sequel felt like a throwback, too, in that it failed to outgross or even match the original, at least in North America, where it fulfilled the old ’70s-and-’80s expectation that a sequel can be expected to make about two-thirds as much money as the original. (Admittedly, it made up some ground with foreign grosses.) Perhaps audience rebelled against the refusal to call the sequel Now You Don’t. Perhaps the competition from the same-weekend release of The Conjuring 2 took some eyes off of it. Or perhaps the novelty had worn off, like a magic trick.

Yet a third movie, which fate has cruelly denied the chance to be called Now You Three Me, has been discussed on and off in the near-decade since the second film underperformed. Is this simply a case of absence making the heart grow fonder, of studios vastly overestimating the appetite for legacy sequels, or is there some greater appeal to this series?

Part of the latter may be Now You See Me’s status as a throwback that doesn’t throw that far back. It’s basically a flashier, sillier, less process-based Ocean’s Eleven-style movie, piggybacking on the ultra-brief magician-movie trend of 2006 that brought about both The Prestige and The Illusionist. (The Prestige is far better-remembered now, but both were minor hits back in their day.) Now You See Me has some Ocean’s-style strength in numbers, even as it lacks any stars as major as George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, or Julia Roberts. (Hell, there are cameos in the Ocean’s movies from bigger stars than anyone in Now You See Me.) On his own, Jesse Eisenberg is not, by design, a major movie star; neither is Isla Fisher (though she was selective enough to sit out the sequel). Morgan Freeman is a big name, but also an old man, and a supporting part in the series. Woody Harrelson was a pretty big star 30 years ago; now he’s a well-liked character actor. Dave Franco is James Franco’s brother. But put them all together and it does kinda feel like a lot of stars! (The first one also had Michael Caine and Mark Ruffalo.) The new movie seems to hold to this tradition by adding Rosamund Pike, Justice Smith, Ariana Greenblatt, and the kid from The Holdovers. That’s a lot of fanbases pooled together.

Basically, a Now You See Me movie is, in spirit, extremely 2000s-coded – which doesn’t seem like an era that would be recalled with much fondness, whether in 2013 or today. But moviegoing looked pretty different a quarter-century ago, and the Now You See Me movies also feel like a tacit acknowledgment of that. The magic-trickery depicted in these movies is typically somewhere north of ludicrous, especially in terms of how it’s actually shown on screen, through a lot of visual-effects cheats. At the same time, those same effects are used to recall a more gentlemanly age of illusions (whether genuine or just nostalgically recalled), where high-tech cons like cinematic sleight-of-hand had a little more presentational flair, maybe a little more cheerful mystery than “pay visual effects houses poor rates for an extreme rush job.” Say what you will about these disposable movies, but Now You See Me uses movie stars and stylistic slickness to really sell its illusions, rather than using the building blocks of filmmaking to prop up its spectacle.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.