WI: Back to the Future 4?

Back to the Future Part 4 (Early Storyboard, pages 1-2 of 16)

SCENE: DR. EMMETT BROWN (Christopher Lloyd), his wife CLARA (Mary Steenburgen), and his children JULES (Macauley Culkin) and VERNE (Kieran Culkin) are flying the HOVER-TIME-TRAIN through a WORMHOLE in time. The WORMHOLE is illustrated in vivid shades of red, swirling around glowing, phantom train tracks.

DOC BROWN
(laughing and cheering)

See boys? The train works as a normal train until you get the throttle up to eighty-eight miles an hour. But once you hit eighty-eight, the flux capacitor opens up this wormhole in time....


CLARA
(adoringly)

Emmett, what happens if the train falls below eighty-eight miles an hour while we're traveling through time?

DOC BROWN
Well, hypothetically, the inflow to the flux capacitor would be interrupted, destabilizing the wormhole through every possible destination between our start and our end. We would literally be at every point along the timeline at once. Hypothetically.


CLARA
(beat)

Well, perhaps you'd better take a look at the furnace, because one of your special logs is wedged in the firebox and it looks like we're slowing down.


DOC BROWN
Great Scott!!

(DOC BROWN climbs down to the furnace and starts tugging on a large block of wood that's wedged into the firebox.)

(grunting)
It's stuck... it's... I've almost got it....(


CLARA
Here, Emmett, let me help you.

CLARA steps behind DOC BROWN and helps tug on the stuck log. All at once, the log pops free from the firebox, sending DOC BROWN falling backwards into CLARA, who falls out the side of the train and disappears into the wormhole.


DOC BROWN
(concerned)
Great Scott!!


JULES
Daddy, where's Mommy?


DOC BROWN
Well, Jules, we were travelling into the past when she fell into the wormhole, so to find your mother we need to turn this Time Train around and go back...

SFX: TITLE SCREEN

...to the future!​

-----------------

I envision an early 1990s Back to the Future, Part 4 as equal parts Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Home Alone, as Doc Brown and his unbelievably annoying child-actor-children skip through time in search of their mother. I suppose that's partly a ripoff of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, while we're at it.

Would it be good? Hell, no. Would it make money? Well, Honey I Shrunk the Kids made north of $200MM, so....
 
I think it would also require the blessings of Michael J Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Stephen Speilberg and Robert Zemeckis behind the camera. I think that is the only way that fans would sanction a Back to the Future sequel/reboot at this point.
Has anyone ever asked for somebody's blessing before making a movie?
Did anyone ask for anyone's blessing for the new Star Trek film? If they did, would that have made anyone like the film, if they would have disliked it otherwise? And was it the old fans who drove the success of that film, or was it the casual viewers?
 

undeadpixel

Banned
eh...I can't think of many film franchises that are able to last much longer than three installments. Not counting horror film series, the only ones I can think of are James Bond and Star Trek. I guess you could count Star Wars as well.

No you can't
 
Good to know. But would the existence of the movie, or the success of the movie depend on getting anyone's blessing? Let alone, the blessings of four people?
 
Back to the Future Part 4 (Early Storyboard, pages 1-2 of 16)

SCENE: DR. EMMETT BROWN (Christopher Lloyd), his wife CLARA (Mary Steenburgen), and his children JULES (Macauley Culkin) and VERNE (Kieran Culkin) are flying the HOVER-TIME-TRAIN through a WORMHOLE in time. The WORMHOLE is illustrated in vivid shades of red, swirling around glowing, phantom train tracks.

I envision an early 1990s Back to the Future, Part 4 as equal parts Honey I Shrunk the Kids and Home Alone, as Doc Brown and his unbelievably annoying child-actor-children skip through time in search of their mother. I suppose that's partly a ripoff of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, while we're at it.

Would it be good? Hell, no. Would it make money? Well, Honey I Shrunk the Kids made north of $200MM, so....

eh...I don't think either of the Culkins were really annoying, at least at certain parts in their careers.
 
I think the Calvin and Hobbes principle is in effect here: maybe it ended before we could have gotten all the good there was to mined from the story and characters, but I'm glad it ended before we descended into Garfield territory.
 
The telltale Games trip to 1931 to explore a Marty aged Doc Brown strikes me as what may well wind up as the BttF4 Plot.


Or maybe BttF4 takes on a familiar and different direction. Marty in 2015 isn't the feisty fool that he was in BttF2--instead, now he's alone and regrets the choices he made in 1985. Yes, he didn't smash into that Rolls Royce, but he also broke up with Jennifer and pursued music in spite of really not being good enough to make a career out of it.


As a particularly bastardly twist, Marty wound up marrying Tiff Tannen, which contributes to his domestic problems.


Now when Doctor Brown and Marty appear in 2015, those problems with his family have snowballed into something far worse. But what if he had a second chance? His Father had a second chance and he went from a loser to a successful man. Maybe young Marty can give himself the answers to his problems and make a better future for himself as well.


Perhaps the antagonist is Tiff Tannen, who plays more like a manipulator than a simple thug.
 
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