Michael J. Fox Has New Idea for Back to the Future Reboot

If it’s density — I mean, destiny — to remake Back to the Future, actor Michael J. Fox has an idea for the new Marty McFly. In his star-making role, Fox played the time-traveling teen opposite Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown in 1985’s Back to the Future, returning for 1989’s Back to the Future Part II and 1990’s Back to the Future Part III. In a new interview with Entertainment Tonight, Fox, 61, shared how he would bring Back to the Future back from the past — without his DeLorean time machine.

“I actually had this thought that if they did the movie again, they should do it with a girl as Marty,” Fox told ET. “There’s something about [the franchise] that connects with people on every level. I just feel like it will come around again.”

But Back to the Future won’t come around again without the go-ahead from director Robert Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale, who “have no plans or desires to make another Back to the Future movie — not a Part IV, or a remake of Part 1.”

“Nor does Universal or [producers] Amblin [Entertainment] have any such plans,” Gale told the BTTF website in a 2010 interview. “How do we know? Because, per our contracts with these companies, no Back to the Future sequel or remake can even be scripted without discussing it with us first. No such discussions have taken place. We are very proud of the trilogy as it stands and we want to leave it as is.”

READ MORE ▸ Back to the Future Stars Say No to Part IV: “It’s Done” ▸ Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd Reunite at New York Comic Con

During the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future in 2015, Zemeckis explained said a reboot or remake “can’t happen until both Bob and I are dead.”

“And then I’m sure they’ll do it, unless there’s a way our estates can stop it,” the director told The Telegraph. “I mean, to me, [a remake is] outrageous. Especially since it’s a good movie. It’s like saying ‘Let’s remake Citizen Kane. Who are we going to get to play Kane?’ What folly, what insanity is that? Why would anyone do that?”

In an exclusive interview with ComicBook, Gale explained what made the 1985 original film a timeless classic: 

“The thing that people don’t always understand about Back to the Futureand what really makes it work, because people say, ‘Oh, let’s do a timetravel series.’ Well, okay, time travel series are really hard to pulloff,” Gale said. “Back to the Futureworks because it’s the story of this family, and time travel is anelement of it, but you are totally with those characters. It’s aterrific dramatization of a moment that every human being has in theirlife, which is the moment when we’re kids and we suddenly realize, ‘Oh,my God, my parents were once kids, too.’ By the time you’re five or sixyears old, you look at your parents and they’re these God-like figures,and they don’t age, as far as you can tell. They must have always beenthere, and then suddenly, by the time you’re seven, eight, nine, yousuddenly start putting it together, that, ‘My parents were once kids.’”

He continued, “That is the power of Back to the Future.It’s the human stuff. It’s not the logistics of traveling through timebecause, frankly, you look at a time travel series, both things thatthey’ve done on television and things that they’ve done in comic books,and they fall into this trap of using time travel as a plot mechanism.”