Today’s contender for least surprising news is that Universal is still begging Robert Zemeckis for another Back To The Future, despite the fact that he’s on record that it won’t happen until he and co-writer Bob Gale are dead. But in a Hollywood thirsty for “established IP,” the studio can’t just take a simple no for an answer. On a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Here director joked that he gets a call about Back To The Future 4 “every six months.”
Though Zemeckis admitted that’s a bit of an exaggeration, he has fielded many of these calls: “‘Isn’t there anything we can figure out to do here? Isn’t there anything we can do?’” He imitated the studio’s needling requests. It sounds like Gale and Zemeckis have patiently tolerated these pitches and offered placating responses, but the real truth is that “to remake the movie or to suggest that there’s a Back To The Future 4, it just isn’t in the cards,” the filmmaker said.
He explained, “We always felt that this was enough, and that it had to just live… with it being the three movies. And [Back To The Future: The Musical] is more of a companion to the movies than a remake of the movie. It’s sort of like… a whole nother thing. And [it’s] just a celebration of the movie, basically.” With that in mind, he did express interest in directing a film version of the Broadway stage show, “Just like [Mel Brooks] did with The Producers. I would love to do that. I think that would be great.” In fact, he revealed he “floated that out to the folks at Universal,” but “They don’t get it. So, nothing I can do.” And thus the movie-to-musical-to-movie musical pipeline (like Little Shop Of Horrors, Hairspray, and most recently Mean Girls) remains dormant… for now.
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