The skip is deliberate and in keeping with the franchise’s self-aware humor. The Jump Street films have always acknowledged their own absurdity, and the end credits sequence of 22 Jump Street leaned into this by showing Schmidt and Jenko going undercover in a cascade of increasingly unlikely settings, including a medical school, a culinary school, a firefighter academy, a dance school, and a seminary, before eventually going to space and becoming a video game and an animated series. That montage effectively covered the territory a 23 Jump Street might have occupied, leaving the next real entry logically positioned as the fourth numbered film.