This tells me two things — (1.) this is going to be a big-budgeted picture, and (2.) Universal's not willing to take the risk in reviving a 15-year-old franchise alone.  This is an unusual situation.  Co-financing between studios certainly is not an uncommon thing as it was just a few years ago.  Paramount and 20th Century Fox partnered on 1997's megahit Titanic.  Universal and DreamWorks recently partnered on this summer's blockbuster Gladiator.  DreamWorks seemingly partners on a vast majority of their feature films, including Zemeckis' upcoming Christmas sure-to-be-a-hit Cast Away, on which they're teaming with 20th Century Fox.  So it's commonplace these days to see two studios pairing up to split the costs and profits on films with large budgets.  However, I'm not aware of a partnership of such on any sequel prior to now, and I find it highly unusual that a studio would pair up with another studio on an established franchise that had no prior financing partner.

Back to the Future had a budget of a mere $15 million in 1984 (upped to $19 million after Michael J. Fox was brought on board to reshoot Eric Stoltz's previously filmed scenes).  Five years later, Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III combined had a budget of $80 million — practically unheard of a decade ago.  While I don't have any clue as to what this new sequel will actually be budgeted at, these reports now seem to indicate that it will be big.

A lot has changed within the film industry in the past ten years, so it's inevitable that relaunching a quality property such as Back to the Future would be met with an all new set of challenges and hurdles.  After all, Universal itself has gone through drastic changes the past ten years, changing ownership once and getting ready to do it again. The management team who were in office during the success of the first three films are no longer at the company, thus it's somewhat easier to understand why the current management team would be a bit uneasy about doing a fourth film single-handedly.  However, the combined box office results speak for themselves on this franchise — a tally of nearly $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts is a feat not very many properties can claim.

Regardless, having DreamWorks as a partner on BTTF4 will seemingly bring certain perks and possibilities.  Afterall, Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers is located at DreamWorks, so his involvement certainly could be made more possible if this partnership comes to be the case.  And I'm sure that Steven Spielberg's hand will be in the mix somewhere since both Amblin and DreamWorks SKG would be involved. Guess we'll just have to wait and see how these plans formulate over the course of the next couple of months.

When queried for additional information regarding the sequel's casting, plot and release information, "Phantom" would only offer the following statements:

"Our casting is still months away — we're merely at a conceptual phase right now."

"We are really focused on getting [another film property] out for 2002 right now, so that's our main project in the pipeline.  This, however, does not preclude BTTF IV from being released in late 2002."

"...no plot information has been released to ANYONE yet."

"...no one outside Amblin, Universal or SKG has seen the script."