Back to the Future 4 Possibility Addressed Definitively by Screenwriter

Screenwriter Bob Gale knows that people want to see a new Back to the Future movie. In fact, he even has a succinct and definitive answer at the ready. “People always say, ‘When are you going to do Back to the Future 4,‘” Gale said (via Yahoo!). “And we say, ‘F*** you.'”

That might sound harsh, but one can imagine that Gale gets that question a lot. After all, Star Wars is on the TV, Indiana Jones is on the Xbox, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice made $294,100,435 last year. The ’80s are back, baby, and they have never really gone away.

Yet for all the ’80s nostalgia on the screen, Doc Brown and Marty McFly have remained absent… mostly. The duo appeared on Broadway and in video games, albeit not played by Christopher Lloyd or Michael J. Fox. Lloyd did reprise the role and drive the DeLorean for a 2011 commercial aired in Argentina, and the DeLorean appeared among the pop culture detritus in Ready Player One. And of course the Rick and Morty characters are a pastiche on a teen and his mad scientist best friend.

But Back to the Future: Legacy has never hit screens, forcing Doc and Marty to team up with Marty and Jennifer’s kids to save their kids. We’ve never seen a reboot with Jeff Goldblum as Doc Brown, recording his experiments for TikTok and installing the flux capacitor in a Cybertruck. And there’s a simple reason we haven’t seen all of these properties. The rights to the project are owned solely by Gale and director Robert Zemeckis, who also co-wrote the movies. So it doesn’t matter how desperate for sweet nostalgia dollars Universal might get. If Gale and Zemeckis aren’t on board, it won’t happen.

Given some of the decisions that Welcome to Marwen director Zemeckis has made lately that’s a bit of a relief. Even though The Polar Express still makes gobs of money and Flight and Contact, and Cast Away have their fans, Zemeckis has never come close to matching his mega-hits Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and Forrest Gump. So a cynic might expect he’s long been primed to take the easy money and let someone else have a crack at the story and universe he co-created.

However, both Zemeckis and Gale seem devoted to protecting the classic they made 40 years ago. Zemeckis loves to experiment with effects and is perfectly content if people hate his version of Beowulf or Pinocchio. Meanwhile Gale has devoted himself lately to curating the legacy of Back to the Future. Neither seems interested in exploiting the concept for something as ridiculous as money.

Which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone who well remembers the trilogy. Back to the Future Part II has received a lot of attention lately thanks to the parallels between the 2015 of the film, in which bully Biff uses his sports betting winnings to make himself into a gauche mogul, and our current era of powerful, gauche dummies and sports betting saturation.

Yet relatively few Americans nostalgic for that movie have seemed to notice that Back to the Future Part II is deeply critical of the rich, suggesting that anyone who goes after money for the sake of money sells more than their souls.

Given that premise in the second film, why would anyone expect Gale and Zemeckis to make a fourth? Looked at that way, Gale’s brusk response doesn’t seem so mean.

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