Back To The Future co-creator Michael J Fox has stated that the film would not have been as successful if Eric Stoltz had not been substituted by Marty McFly while the film was still in production.

After a month of production, the Pulp Fiction actor was cut from the 1985 classic film about a high school student who is unintentionally flung 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean.

“If we had finished the film with Eric Stoltz, I don’t think we would be having this conversation today,” writer Bob Gale, who co-wrote the script with director Robert Zemeckis after discovering his own father’s high school yearbook, told the PA news agency.

“He was so perfect, you can’t imagine anyone else to be him, although when you see Back To The Future The Musical in London when we open in May or June, you will see Olly Dobson playing Marty McFly and you will say ‘Wow this kid is great, I totally accept him as Marty’, so it can be done and we have done it, but Michael J Fox was perfect, it’s hard to imagine anybody else as Marty.

“It’s hard to imagine anybody else in any of those key roles really, they grew into their parts thanks to their own talent, thanks to Bob Zemeckis’s directing, thanks to what was a pretty good script, and everything else that was in support of the picture.”

‘Back to the Future’ writer Bob Gale Says There Will Never Be a Reboot

Feb 24, 2020

Mireya Acierto/FilmMagic

The co-writer of Back to the Future has poured ice water on fans’ dreams for a third installment in the sci-fi series.

Fans wanting to see Marty McFly hook up with Doc Brown on another time-traveling adventure as they transfer the baton to a new generation, a.k.a. “soft reboot,” will have to wait a long time, according to writer/producer Bob Gale, who spoke with the BBC. Such a remake, according to Gale, is akin to selling “your kids into prostitution.”

“You know, you don’t sell your kids into prostitution. (Another movie would be) the wrong thing to do. We put ‘The End’ at the end of part three… Plus Michael J. Fox isn’t in the shape to do a movie, and nobody wants to see Marty McFly having Parkinson’s disease, and nobody wants to see another actor playing Marty McFly if it’s supposed to be a continuation.”

The fact that there hasn’t been a Back to the Future revival yet isn’t due to a lack of effort on the part of Hollywood’s bigwigs. Gale claims he’s been approached dozens of times in the past by studios offering significant sums of money to relinquish the rights, but he claims he’s already “made a lot of money” and is adamant that the blockbuster film franchise has reached its conclusion. Officially, a new Back to the Future film cannot be done without the agreement of Gale and director Robert Zemeckis, since the two had it written into their Universal contracts that no new Back to the Future film could be made without their approval.

The studio, on the other hand, has offered many proposals that they have politely rebuffed.

“All the time. All the time,” Gale said regarding the offers. “‘What can we do to convince you guys to do this?’ We said, ‘Nothing.’ ‘You’ll make a lot of money.’ ‘We already made a lot of money.’”

He claims that everyone concerned is certain that Marty and the Doc should not return to the big screen.

“We learn from the fact that so many studios have gone back to the well on some of their franchise properties too many times, and the audiences are disappointed and say: ‘Oh my God, they ruined my childhood,'” Gale continued.

“We don’t want to ruin anybody’s childhood, and doing a musical was the perfect way to give the public more Back to the Future without messing up what has gone before.”

Though a sequel is unlikely in the near future, actor Christopher Lloyd stated last year that the next film should focus on something “important,” such as “climate change.”

“I think somehow it needs to kind of convey a message about something that’s important to everyone, universally, like climate change. Some way of incorporating whatever fever is going on at the moment into the film and keep the feeling of one, two, and three,” Lloyd told the audience at a Niagara Falls Comic-Con. “That’s a tricky, tricky deal. Because you don’t want to do another one and disappoint. So I don’t know. I’d be happy to, for myself. But we’ll see.”