It's time to reboot Back to the Future

What's a re-run? You'll find out.

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I don’t have particularly high-brow tastes.

I’d love to be someone with snooty film opinions, but in the average year, I see maybe one or two of the Oscar ‘Best Picture’ contenders.¹ The reality is that most of the films I watch tend to have a car chase, gun-fight, or – ideally – both.

However, I increasingly feel like I’ve lost my patience with modern blockbusters.

Maybe it’s Disney running the Marvel Cinematic Universe into the ground, or the broader domination of franchise films at the box office, or that I’m just getting old, but there’s now very little that I can actually be bothered to head to the cinema to see.

Or perhaps it is the fault of the critics? Specifically, the fact that there are too many of them.

The problem is that unlike the pre-internet era, when there was less ‘content’ to spend time with, today it’s virtually impossible to go into a film blind.²

As soon as I’ve got the vibe that the critical consensus is lukewarm, I become significantly less motivated to get off my arse and head to the cinema to see it. It means that a three or four star film that I might have taken a chance with in a previous era becomes something that I’ll never see – because why bother?

And related to this, the value over replacement value of watching a new film, when I have almost the entirety of human culture at my fingertips is much lower. Why take a risk on something new when I’m 38 and could just watch something that I know is good again – or that I could scroll through slop on Facebook instead?

So though I’ll probably make it to Avengers: Doomsday next year, out of morbid curiosity,³ the odds of me even watching The Mandalorian and Grogu in thirty-minute chunks while running on a treadmill is virtually nil.

But this all said, despite my lack of enthusiasm, there is still one IP-driven reboot I would like to see.

I’m talking, of course, about Back to the Future.

I realise this is a heretical opinion, and that the original is a beloved classic. For millennials of a certain age, it is a film that ascends to a more untouchable level of reverence, on a par with, say, the original Jurassic Park or Matrix films. And it is also a film that original director Robert Zemeckis has repeatedly refused to let Hollywood reboot.

But I genuinely think that now is the time – and that it could be a huge critical and commercial success if done right.

So here’s my sketch of how to do it.