“Let’s get started, the audience is leaving”: A glimpse into a family afternoon at the movies watching ‘Father There is Only One 5’

The heat wave is no longer a threat, and at six in the evening, a thermometer at the entrance of Kinépolis, in Boadilla (Madrid), reads 36 degrees. Going to the movies seems like the best way to get through the first Friday without school. A family with three daughters aged five to ten is trying to get tickets from one of the machines in this megacomplex that has a Guinness record. “It’s that one, Dad, click on that,” says Martina, the oldest sister, to her father while unsuccessfully trying to figure out how the system works. “We’re in the biggest room,” he responds, attempting to join in his daughter’s excitement, who identifies each member of the family from Father There’s Only One 5, the latest installment of the Santiago Segura saga that has broken box office records every summer since 2019. Just on Thursday the 26th, the premiere day, it made over half a million euros and was already the box office leader. According to provisional data from ComScore, the company that audits movie box offices, it has surpassed 1,022,000 euros between Friday and Saturday.

What this father, exhausted, who is going to find someone to help him get five tickets (a little over 11 euros per person), doesn’t know is that this afternoon the room, recognized as the largest in Spain, will resemble a walk-in cooler because only about 50 of the thousand available seats will be filled. Very few bodies to generate enough heat to combat the powerful air conditioning. Two sisters, aged eight and ten, with a cotton candy bucket in hand, must have felt the same disappointment as they entered and yelled to their mother: “This is huge and it’s going to fill up!”

In the hallway distributing the theaters, a clear division of spectators is already apparent: teenagers over 15 without their parents and a few groups of friends head to see F1, the movie. The rest of the minors head to room 25, which has two entrances, to see if Javier García (Santiago Segura) and Marisa Loyola (Toni Acosta) manage to kick one of their six children or those hangers-on who have latched onto them over the previous four installments out of their house. Hence the movie’s subtitle, Nest Full.

Fifteen minutes into advertisements and family movie trailers, a father shouts: “Come on,” it’s unclear if from desperation or due to his five-year-old daughter’s eagerness, who stands up and sings: “Let it start already, the audience is leaving.” She doesn’t get to finish the song before the movie starts. “Yay,” she cheers.

From this moment, the film has as many interpretations as there are age groups in the audience. Children’s laughter can be heard every time the youngest daughter in the movie makes a joke or shows her clever mischief. It’s easy to identify the laughter of the parents; not only by the tone but also because it’s always after jokes about the physical appearance of the character played by Leo Harlem, the failed (and perhaps overly repetitive) attempts by Segura to shake off his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his son-in-law, and even his mother. The character is played by Loles León, who never fails to please the audience, although there’s a sense of déjà vu since 2003, when she first appeared in the series Here There’s No One Alive.

“It’s a realistic film,” Segura has warned during the promotion of this installment and the previous ones. The saga began by exploiting the classic genre of parents overwhelmed by circumstances (two examples: Three Men and a Baby and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). In other words, a plot supported by a man who unleashes chaos and comedy by being unable to take responsibility for the most basic care of his children. The trope changes from the second installment, when there’s a sort of deconstruction of the filmmaker’s character toward a supposed new masculinity from which more gags unfold.

“These movies succeed not because they condemn this character or aim to dismantle this archetype, but because they kindly laugh at him,” says columnist and screenwriter Paloma Rando, who defends the counterpoint that Toni Acosta has brought to the franchise: a mother who from the first installment identified her husband as “a brother-in-law.” “Because he indeed was, and comedy needs conflict,” explained the saga’s screenwriter, Marta González de Vega, in recent statements to Adolfo Kunjuk News.

Segura has built a cast that also allows each viewer to find their mirror on screen. “The emotional connection of children with the characters is key to the success of this saga,” Rando continues. “Six years have passed since the first premiere, a time that may seem shorter for an adult, but for a child, it can mean almost their entire childhood or even entering the first adolescence. They have grown alongside the characters. That is very powerful and has a hooking effect.”

The proof is at the end of the movie: as in many Pixar films, you have to stay seated, even if the lights are turned on, because there’s a surprise. In this case, a series of images and videos that review moments from all five installments and a compilation of personal photos of the actors showing the significant changes that time produces in the younger ones, some of whom are already teenagers and adults. “This generates an identity and a connection that speaks in an intergenerational way and ultimately creates a habit,” says film analyst Pau Brunet.

Since 2019, Segura has brought over nine million people to theaters in Spain and has grossed over 53 million euros with this franchise. “Between 2017 and 2024, Spanish producers have managed to develop more than 50 family films, both animated and live-action, that have grossed 224 million euros and sold nearly 37 million tickets,” calculated Brunet, “and the main contributor to this revenue is the Bowfinger factory, led by Santiago Segura and María Luisa Gutiérrez. Together, they have nine titles that have accumulated 86.6 million euros and nearly 15 million tickets sold.”

The director has timed the release of his movies to the start of summer, making it almost a summer opening event. “It becomes an indicator of the season, like Christmas or Easter movies,” notes the film analyst, “and these traditions work very well not only in Spain but all around the world.”

The screen goes black and a strong light comes in through the exit door past eight in the evening. The two siblings who couldn’t sit through the whole movie congratulate themselves on their feat: “We escaped to the bathroom and didn’t get caught.” A grandmother, already devoid of any filter, tells her granddaughter: “What a bore, didn’t you notice I fell asleep?” Another mother, not yet as liberated by age and the security that comes from a clear awareness of the inevitability of time, confesses to her two children: “This was the most boring, but it was okay.” The father continues with positive reinforcement and concludes: “And now, let’s go for some burgers,” much to his children’s delight.

The families have to cross to the parking lot to return to Kinépolis, where several fast-food restaurants await them. Another day of school vacation successfully completed.