Right now it doesn’t sound as though a fourth installment of Back to the Future is going to be forthcoming any time soon according to Robert Zemeckis, but maybe that’s a good thing. Mike Sprague from MovieWeb would definitely seek to differ since he happens to be a fan along with so many others, and quite honestly it’s hard to disagree. But it’s not hard to say that at this point Christopher Lloyd is in his 80s and with Michael J. Fox there’s no telling just how much of a toll filming would take on him. Obviously neither man is made of glass and they’re not on their deathbeds, but they are quite a bit older than they were when the third installment came out and at this point it even begs the question as to what the whole story might be about. Honestly it’s not hard to see that there are angles that could be worked and a story line that could be concocted to appease the fans that have been waiting for it all these years, but Zemeckis seems pretty adamant that this is never going to happen.
Climate change is an idea that has been kicked around a bit when it comes the idea of a fourth movie, but given that the first three have centered around the McFly family and those they interact with it would almost seem like a serious detour from the original story. Yes, there is a possibility of tying it all in to the McFly’s, but there’s also a good chance that a story about convergent timelines and the problems that arise from ‘fixing’ the past could come about as well. Plus there’s the idea that Emmett and his wife, who are after all raising two sons that would know quite a bit about time travel and regard it as normal, are still able to jump back and forth between the decades and centuries. There’s simply too much material and too many ideas to sift through at this point and it would seem as though the overall story would need an expert team of writers to pare it all down into something that makes sense. But that’s not where it ends, as the story would also need a director of Zemeckis’ caliber or, barring that, someone that had a decent track record to come on board and gain permission to take over where Zemeckis though he’d left off. It’s a mess in other words, a fixable mess, but one that has a lot of working parts that need to be set right before anything could get going on the project.
The main part that people would likely worry about would be the story, and while climate change is a universal concept that people agree and disagree on vehemently, it’s also something that seems as though it belongs in a disaster movie, not a movie concerning time traveling individuals that are trying to make life a little better for their own family. That’s one of the sticking points of this story after all, there was nothing universal about the plot of the story. It was all about Marty McFly going back in time, accidentally the first time, as he was trying to escape a pair of Libyan terrorists. Then it was a mad dash to get back to the future while at the same time fixing his own family’s problems, resulting in his father being a confident author and his father’s bully being relegated to something of a bumbling moron. The second movie didn’t really deviate since it was about Marty going to the future to save his son from wasting a good part of his life in prison, only to end up screwing up the time line when he lost hold of a gambling book that Biff used to change his own future. From there it was necessary to go back again, steal the book, and then get back to the future again, only this time Doc Brown was the one that accidentally disappeared, and in the third film Marty had to go and get him.
So if you’re keeping track the only thing that all three movies ended up being about were Marty trying to fix the problems of the past and the future and ending up doing just that. As Alysa Avina from The Gamer might agree we never did get to see the fallout from all this, apart from the positive changes that came to his family and the less than ideal way that Biff turned out in the original movie. So if a fourth movie suddenly focused on a universal issue that affected everyone it wouldn’t just break from the original idea, it would likely make a lot of fans scratch their heads as they tried to figure out just what it had to do with the first three.
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