In news that will no doubt disappoint legions of fans, Back to the Future writer Bob Gale has revealed exactly why there won’t be a fourth film.
Gale, who co-write each film in the Back to the Future trilogy, explained on The Collider Podcast that the filmmakers have already told a “complete story.”
He began: “We told a complete story with the trilogy. If we went back and made another one, we’d have Michael J. Fox, who will be sixty next year, and he has Parkinson’s Disease. Do we want to see Marty McFly at age sixty with Parkinson’s Disease? Did we want to see him at age fifty with Parkinson’s Disease? I would say ‘No, you don’t want to see that.’”
In response to those who suggest replacing Fox with someone else, Gale insisted that “you don’t want to see Back to the Future without Michael J. Fox.”
“People say, ‘Well, do it with somebody else.’ Really? Who are you going to get? All you’re gonna do is beg comparisons to the originals, and you’re not going to match up,” he said.
Gale went on to compare the possibility of a fourth film to Star Wars: Episode I -The Phantom Menace, which received polarising reviews upon its release.
“We’ve seen this repeatedly with sequels that go back to the well after many, many years, and they go ‘Ah, well, The Phantom Menace, maybe my life would have been better if I hadn’t seen it…’ there are a lot of extra sequels like that.,” he said.
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Ultimately, he said, they “didn’t want to be those guys who did a movie that was basically a money-grab.”
“Universal [Pictures] says to us, ‘You guys would make a whole lot of money,’ but we’re like, ‘Well, we’ve already made a whole lot of money with these movies, and we like them just the way they are. And as proud parents, we’re not going to sell our kids into prostitution.’”
On that note, check out Back to the Future writer Bob Gale discussing why there won’t be a fourth film:
