Over Half Of People Surveyed Want A Remake Of This Iconic '80s Movie

If it seems like Hollywood can't stay away from rebooting, remaking, and sequel-izing every reasonably successful property from the 1980s, well, film fans who remember the Neon Decade will tell you that there's a reason for that. It's tough to figure out how so much awesomeness could be packed into ten short years, spanning every single popular genre of film. You want great comedies? The '80s gave us Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, The Naked Gun, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and much more. You're into horror? Don't even get the '80s started: Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Child's Play, The Thing, Hellraiser, The Shining, and The Evil Dead were all born during the decade, to name a few. How about action? Oh, you mean like RoboCop, Lethal Weapon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, Die Hard, and pretty much all the best films of action icons Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone? Yep, the '80s spawned them all.

Even genres that are typically acknowledged to have had their heydays during other periods, like rom-coms (Splash, anyone?) and superhero films (ahem, Batman) fielded stone-cold classics during the '80s, and moreover, it can be persuasively argued that it was the decade in which modern standards of editing, pacing, cinematography, and special effects were all firmly established, not to mention the concept of the big-budget blockbuster. Somehow, it seems like filmmakers have been reworking, revamping, and rejiggering everything those ten years produced for the last three decades — and they're still not done.

With that in mind, we decided to ask our readers: which classic flick from the '80s would you most like to see remade? We took a survey of 650 fans from all across the U.S., and over half of them gave a response that is pretty shocking — because the original is not just a near-perfect film, it was the first movie in a near-perfect trilogy.

With a whopping 50.62 percent of the vote, the beloved 1985 flick Back to the Future was the movie most deserving of the remake treatment, according to our survey's respondents. We can actually think of one pretty good reason why this would be the case: in early 2020, a short clip from the original film was uploaded to YouTube, in which the faces of Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown were replace via deepfake technology with Marvel Cinematic Universe stars Tom Holland and Robert Downey, Jr., respectively. The clip illustrated just how very easily the charming chemistry between the two stars on display in their MCU appearances together could port over to the roles of Doc and Marty, and Holland has even confirmed that the idea of a Back to the Future redo has been floated to him by studio Universal Pictures (via ScreenRant).

However, the fans calling for the project to get into gear are going to be disappointed. Asked about the possibility by Entertainment Tonight, Holland said, "I would not be interested in that, because [Back to the Future] is a perfect movie." He also revealed that the character of Marty greatly informed his performance as Peter Parker in the MCU, so the idea of actually playing Marty didn't hold a great deal of appeal for him.

Furthermore, the original film's director, Robert Zemeckis — who, along with its writer Bob Gale, holds the rights to the franchise — has stated plainly that no remake will happen as long as the pair are breathing. "Oh God, no. That can't happen until both Bob and I are dead," Zemeckis told The Telegraph. "I mean, to me, that's outrageous. Especially since it's a good movie. It's like saying 'Let's remake Citizen Kane' [...] What folly, what insanity is that? Why would anyone do that?"

Coming in a surprisingly strong second place: the 1983 Cold War techno-thriller WarGames, which pulled in 23.85 percent of the vote. In case you need a refresher, the flick starred a pre-Ferris Bueller Matthew Broderick as David, a young and talented computer hacker who breaches a mysterious, unidentified server which appears to be loaded with interesting games, including one called "Global Thermonuclear War," which he, of course, begins to play. As it turns out, the teen has actually hacked into a powerful, artificially intelligent new NORAD supercomputer entrusted with the analyzing the threat of a nuclear strike by the then-Soviet Union — and responding in kind, meaning that David has set into motion events which may lead to World War III. The critically-acclaimed film became renowned for its unbelievably tense final scenes, in which David and the computer's designer ingeniously teach it the concept of mutually assured destruction using the game of Tic Tac Toe. When it applies what it's learned to its simulations of all possible outcomes of a global nuclear exchange, it issues its famous conclusion: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

With the ridiculously rapid proliferation of technology since the film's release, international relations just as volatile and uncertain as they were in the '80s, and artificial intelligence actually being a thing now, this is one flick that we agree is ripe for an update. A reboot of sorts attempted in 2018, with interactive media company Eko's six-episode web series #WarGames, but it failed to register more than a blip on pop culture radar. In 2014, director Dean Israelite (Power Rangers) was reported to be attached to a proper theatrical remake of WarGames (via Collider), but the project doesn't appear on his IMDb page; if the project is still alive at all, it appears to be stuck in Development Hell.

Garnering 11.85 percent of the vote is another offering from 1983: Scarface, director Brian DePalma's gangster epic, which tells the story of complete moral vacuum Tony Montana (Al Pacino) as he rises from lowly Cuban immigrant to Miami drug kingpin. The flick is itself a loose remake of Howard Hawks' 1932 original, which was not-so-subtly based on the life of Al Capone — and, as it turns out, the tale is indeed being reimagined for the present day. Director Luca Guadagnino, who did an admirable job with his 2018 reworking of the horror classic Suspiria, has been put in charge of the new version, which he told Variety in June 2020 will hopefully "be another worthy reflection on a character who is a paradigm for our own compulsions for excess and ambition," adding that he thinks his take "will be very timely."

Bringing up the rear with 6.77 percent of the vote is the underrated 1985 comedy Real Genius, which follows freshman college student Mitch (Gabriel Jarret) and his older roommate Chris (Val Kilmer), exceptionally bright engineers who come to discover that their professor has them working on a secret, highly sketchy project for the CIA. The flick didn't set the box office on fire, but has deservedly become a cult classic; a TV series based on it was announced in 2014 (via ScreenRant) but fizzled out, and as of this writing there's no movement on a remake.

Among the responses included in the "Other" contingent, which represented 6.92 percent of the vote: the John Hughes classic Sixteen Candles, Jim Henson's musical fantasy Labyrinth, and the infamous stinker Howard the Duck, based on a Marvel character who has since cameoed in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Endgame. The big takeaway here, though: Back to the Future fans will just have to be happy with the trilogy they have, which really isn't that tall of an order.