Great Scott! According to a recent survey conducted by Hollywood Reporter, 71% of Americans say they would likely watch another Back to the Future movie! What is wrong with people? I love Back to the Future as much as the next 80’s kid. The sci-fi comedy was one of the defining movies of our generation. And that’s exactly why we need to let the Back to the Future franchise die. Or perhaps more accurately in this case, let it stay dead.

Back to the Future was the brain child of Bob Gale. After discovering his father’s yearbook, the writer realized that there were a lot of things he didn’t know about his dad. He wondered whether or not he would have been friends with his father if they had attended school together. From that question sprung the idea of a modern teen going back in time and meeting his parents when they were in high school.

Gale brought the idea to director Robert Robert Zemeckis with whom he had collaborated on two previous movies, I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Used Cars. Neither of these movies were box office hits which presented a problem. The studios were reluctant to take a chance on an unusual and potentially expensive sci-fi comedy with Oedipal undertones from a couple of guys who had never made a hit movie.

Fortunately, Zemeckis had a powerful ally. His mentor was none other than Steven Spielberg. But Zemeckis was reluctant to rely too heavily on his connections for fear that he would be seen as riding Spielberg’s coattails. He wanted to establish himself first. After the success of Romancing the Stone, which Zemeckis directed, he felt he was ready to make Back to the Future.

During all of these delays, Gale and Zemeckis kept going back to their script. In an early draft, Doc Brown’s time machine was built out of a refrigerator rather than a DeLorean. Can you imagine? Back to the Future could have been a very different movie if Zemeckis’ earlier films had been more successful at the box office. The extra time spent on the script paid off. Back to the Future is a solidly constructed comedy which sets up jokes in the first act that pay off later in the movie.

But the troubles didn’t stop once the movie started filming. From the beginning, Zemeckis wanted to cast Michael J. Fox as time traveling teen, Marty McFly. Unfortunately, Fox was unavailable due to his commitment to the hit sitcom, Family Ties. Instead, Eric Stoltz got the part. It became one of the most legendary cases of miscasting in Hollywood history. After weeks of filming and at great expense, Zemeckis decided the movie just wasn’t working with Stoltz in the lead. Everyone agreed that the role would need to be recast.

By then, Fox was available to take the part obviously. And the rest, as they say, is history. Back to the Future was a big hit. It was so adored by audiences that here we are more than three decades later still talking about it. Apparently, 71% of people asked still want more. But here’s the thing. We’ve been down this path already.

The first movie ends with the words “to be continued…” Zemeckis and Gale intended these words as a joke. The McFly story, like that of any family, is generational. The movie presents a small slice of family history. Undoubtedly the most interesting chapter assuming Marty’s descendants and/or ancestors didn’t have access to a time machine. To their surprise, viewers conditioned to expecting sequels to even the most marginal of hits took the ending as a promise rather than a gag.

Initially, Zemeckis and Gale resisted the idea of revisiting their creation. But eventually, they gave in to Universal’s requests for a sequel knowing that if they didn’t make it themselves, someone else would. Not wanting to see Back to the Future turn into Teen Wolf Too, they agreed to make two sequels back-to-back on the condition that the series would end after the trilogy was completed.

Surprisingly, Universal has honored that agreement. Back to the Future is one of the few successful movies from the 80’s that hasn’t been mined for a few extra bucks. But you have to wonder if some studio guys aren’t considering a reboot in light of the recent headlines from the Hollywood Reporter survey. Never mind what happened with the Ghostbusters reboot. If audiences want more Back to the Future, odds are Universal wants to give it to them.

Being a guy who spends a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things, I have sometimes wondered if there isn’t a way to revive the Back to the Future. A part of me will always consider it blasphemy, but it’s still something I consider from time to time. Michael J. Fox’s condition (he has Parkinson’s disease) surely limits his involvement. But even if that wasn’t the case, there’s no reason to think Fox would be interested. He has returned to the character from time to time (video games, TV appearances), but he has been pretty consistent in his desire not to make any more Back to the Future movies.

You could probably make a Back to the Future 4 with Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown. There are two ways you could go with that. One, you could make Doc the protagonist of the new movie. Call it the Jack Sparrow approach. But promoting a supporting character to the leading role rarely works. The alternative would be to have Doc befriend a new teenage time traveler and start the whole thing over again.. aka The Next Karate Kid approach. It could even by one of Marty’s descendants although that would be difficult given that we saw Marty’s kids in Back to the Future Part II and they were played by Fox.

The cleanest approach would be a Back to the Future remake. But really. What would be the point of that? You’re not going to outdo the original so why bother trying? The first movie walked a tightrope with material that would have been off-putting if the execution had been anything less than stellar. The movie just flat out didn’t work without an extraordinarily likable and charismatic leading man. What are the offs of finding the next Michael J. Fox in a world full of Eric Stoltzes.

Also, a remake would almost certainly be sanitized beyond recognition. It would be like that Robocop remake that took out all the things that made the original movie memorable in the first place.

One of the reasons we’re still talking about Back to the Future is that the first movie was unlike anything else in theaters at the time. While the sequels have their charms, they show that more Back to the Future isn’t necessarily a good thing. By the time the third movie was released, it was obvious that the creators of the series were out of ideas and audiences were ready to move on to the next thing. Back then, we knew that stories had to come to an end.

If there was any doubt about the prospects of continuing the series beyond the third movie, Zemeckis and Gale cleared it up. The second movie, which ended on a cliffhanger, ends with the words “To be concluded…” And Part 3 announces in big, bold letters that this is…

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