Time travel makes reboots easy. You go back in time, change the future, and — boom — you’ve got yourself an entirely new series of events to play with in your old franchise without pissing off fans of the original because those films still count too. Despite that fact, and probably for the best, we will never, ever be getting a reboot, sequel, revamp, recreation, duplication, or anything else for Back to the Future.
Bob Gale, co-writer for the series, put it in very blunt terms speaking to the BBC, “You know, you don’t sell your kids into prostitution. (Another movie would be) the wrong thing to do. We put ‘The End’ at the end of part three… Plus Michael J. Fox isn’t in the shape to do a movie, and nobody wants to see Marty McFly having Parkinson’s disease, and nobody wants to see another actor playing Marty McFly if it’s supposed to be a continuation.”
Evidently there was a bit of a clamoring for a reboot of the series, which saw Michael J. Fox accidentally use a DeLorean to time travel into his past and then into his future and then into… the wild west. Gale says that he and director Robert Zemeckis have been approached multiple times to bring the series back but have always turned it down, and no one can make a new movie without their permission, a rare amount of creator control.
This has all been in the headlines again because of a recent DeepFake that went viral replacing the faces of Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd with Tom Holland and Robert Downey Jr. respectively. It’s a cool watch, for sure, and triggered calls for a reboot with the two actors. If you’re rolling your eyes, don’t forget that we have Deadpool thanks to a video posted to the internet being popular, and all of our lives are much better because people yelled about the living nightmare that was Sonic’s original design in Sonic the Hedgehog. Still, on the whole, not rebooting Back to the Future in this age of endless reboots and sequels is a good thing. The franchise can live on its own now.
If you really, really want more Back to the Future, you can always hit up the new musical that Gale was supporting when he dropped his quote about a reboot. You just need to make your way to the Manchester Opera House.
