Those eyes are pretty in the right light, but the rest of this will have to go.

February 2014 will see The Killing‘s Joel Kinnaman taking over for Peter Weller as the new Robocop. This fall Ironside returns to TV with Blair Underwood somehow replacing Raymond Burr. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet are but a few of the myriad characters to return from pop-culture limbo in overhauled guises. And this is the sentence I had set aside for DC Comics if I could narrow the possible examples down to less than four hundred.

At the rate our entertainment recyclers are plowing through their back catalogs, every intellectual property from the last fifty years will have been remade and/or rebooted before I’m fifty. Even if 90% of them flop, every producer, editor, or writer will convince themselves their attempt will be different from all the rest because they truly believe in themselves, if not their work. Maybe 10% of them will hit the jackpot, reap the rewards, and retire at forty.

Sounds like a sweet deal to me, even though I’m running dozens of laps behind the competition. If I’m to win, I need to move now. That’s why I’m calling dibs on E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s not taken, right? Excellent.

If you haven’t seen the original film: great! Don’t mind me while I propose numerous changes to freshen up the thirty-year-old cinematic colossus for a new generation. Sure, Steven Spielberg’s near-timeless classic was formerly beloved by millions of small children, but science fiction, like comic books, doesn’t care about your small children anymore. Heck, maybe you were one of those underage E.T. fans way back when. Let me ask you this: who deserves this movie more: you, who used to love him thiiiiis much? Or your unappreciative kids, who wouldn’t be able to pick E.T. out of a lineup if he were standing next to ALF, Garfield, a Jawa, and Zelda Rubinstein?

Right, then. Buy your kids another Dora the Explorer DVD to babysit them, and let’s do this. Dora’s good for kids up to, what, age twelve, right? Perfect. That means they won’t stand in the way of our inserting the one or two F-words that our studio-mandated PG-13 rating will allow us. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First problem: that title. “Extra-Terrestrial” is too pretentious. Everyone knows what “E.T.” meant. No need to explain it now…but what if we subvert it? Keep the important part of the title but jazz it up a little. I’m thinking along the lines of E.T.: the Epic Traveler. Okay, granted, “epic” is on its way out, but my first choice, E.T.: the Extreme Traveler is so ten-minutes-ago. We’ll just tell everyone our use of “epic” is ironic. That’ll net us an instant free pass from the audience if our advertising barrage spins it just so.

Problem #2: our star. He’s unmarketable. He’s short, pudgy, nude, wrinkly, bobble-headed, and stump-footed, and he has freakish hands like the scary old great-aunt who wouldn’t stop pointing angrily at you that one time you visited her at the nursing home. He’s begging for a hip redesign. I’m thinking we make him six feet tall, slender but athletic. We make him golden-skinned so that he’s of no specific human race, and yet symbolic of all human races at once. Somehow. We’ll leave any shred of symbolism or allegory up to any improv bits the actors sneak past the director when he’s not looking. If anything meaningful shines through in their performances without interfering with all the explosions I have planned, I’ll consider it a pleasant surprise, assuming I notice.

It goes without saying this means no puppetry required. Puppets are out unless they’re funny, and Our Hero will not be funny. He’s all alone, isolated from his kind, trapped on a world he never made, seeking companionship and asylum and whatnot. I’d love to hire, say, a Radcliffe or a Lautner for this role, or maybe even the Warm Bodies guy if he weren’t already slated for twelve films this year. But we can’t afford an actual Radcliffe or Lautner. We need that money for visual effects. No, this role is ideal for a rising young talent who could be a superstar one day, but hasn’t landed the right management yet. Our best bet: we pick one of the third-tier teens they used to fill in the backgrounds of all those Twilight flicks. If our man plays his cards right and leads this film to a $300 million domestic take, then he can renegotiate his future film contracts upward for tidy six-figure sums.

Something else missing here: E.T. needs a gun. Guns are cool, right? In the original, the bad guys are all armed, but all E.T. has is his space magic, a kid’s bike, and a cable-TV setup he kludged together from Goodwill leftovers. That’s fine for selling a peacetime hero, I guess. I wouldn’t know. So yeah, Our Hero needs a gun. Make it a space gun, with settings for “stun”, “kill”, “levitate”, “memory loss”, “sparkle”, or whatever other contrivances we’ll need to resolve whatever mess the studio rewrites will make of my Act Three.

Summing up so far: our rebooted Epic Traveler is a buff, golden-hued, brooding ex-vampire with space guns. Plural. Because guns. Next is his supporting cast. The mom character can stay. We have plenty of unemployed Best Supporting Actress winners who’ll stab each other for the role. She’ll give us a dignified voice of authority, maybe teach an important Moral of the Story, and then we shuffle her offstage. If she demands more than three scenes, we’ll have a talk with her agent.

As for those kids: Three of them? Three? Why? Show of hands: anyone remember how useful the blond older brother was? No? That’s what I thought. He’s history. Henry stays, but I think the key to making this reboot really pop is the sister. As five-year-olds go, Drew Barrymore could do no wrong, but our young-adult moviegoing demographic has no use for five-year-olds in a film except as extras. Five-year-old, schmive-year-old — this sister will be an older teen. Older than Henry, even. In fact, let’s keep Henry the same age as before, but demote him to comic relief. We needed one of those anyway, and it saves me the trouble of having to invent a whole new character. New characters are for chump writers.

So now the sister is our viewpoint character. Her name used to be Gertie, but that’s lame. We’ll cast some clear-skinned blond for the role, age 18-21, and let her pick a name. We’ll call it a job perk, tell her it’s our way of involving her in the creative process. And now that “Gertie” is older, you know what that means: romance. See, our hunky E.T. is hunky for a reason. She’s older and more relatable; he’s taller and much hotter; it’s obvious our new E.T. and Gertie are a couple meant to be together. If nothing else, this brilliant romantic angle will help me sell this to the womenfolk, and probably fill ten or fifteen minutes of dead air between the explosions that end Act Two and the big reveal of the massive alien armada that kicks off Act Three.

With all the pieces in place, the plot writes itself, doesn’t it? Alien stud on the run from space oppressors crash-lands on Earth, just outside Gertie’s house. Gertie lures him inside with Skittles or Snickers or Taco Bell tacos or some other product-placement grub. He gets to know the family; they tell friends and neighbors that he’s an exchange student from a fictional country. Hilarity ensues for a while until we find out E.T. crash-landed on Earth on purpose. He’s in possession of some fancy MacGuffin that evil space overlords need so they can finish taking over the galaxy.

We can reuse the part where E.T. needs to transmit a signal to his people. I wouldn’t dream of cutting out iconic parts like that. Today’s technology being what it is, I figure two minutes of genius-level hacking into a product-placement smartphone should be all he needs to contact his good-guy pals stationed thousands of light-years away. Only problem is, he thinks so little of us that he doesn’t believe humans have invented smartphones yet. That’ll be a wacky running gag until Gertie gets through to him in Act Two, after his big, destructive throwdown with John Cusack and his heavily armed Area 51 men-in-black squad.

Wait, before I forget: E.T. still has his powers of glowing, healing, and especially flying. We’ll see that best in the scene where he takes Gertie on their first real date, which will consist of them gliding around the world to look dreamily at some pretty, non-American panoramas for the sake of our overseas audience. Along with all that, our E.T. has years of space warrior training under his belt. And his space guns. Four of ’em. The two guns I mentioned earlier, plus the alien equivalent of a .22 holstered on his ankle, and for Act Three we’ll see him cobble together a space Gatling gun out of scrap metal and gardening tools, which we’ll finally see during the final boss battle that ends with him screaming, “Phone THIS!” and holding the trigger down till the ammo’s used up.

That should be more than enough thinking on my part to get the ball rolling. All the important elements are there: star-crossed lovers in danger; worlds at stake; E.T.’s cavalry arrives near the end; the ships clash over Vancouver; and we keep it bloodless while writing wacky little Henry’s dialogue exactly like one of those foul-mouthed Super 8 kids so we can lock in our PG-13 seal of approval. Without that, this entire $250 million project is pointless.

Sure, some of this may sound like an outlandish hard sell. Older fans will object and sign useless internet petitions. Let ’em. Most of the naysayers will pay money to see it anyway. It’s what they do. Between them and the curious, undiscerning youngsters with all the disposable income, my box office victory is guaranteed. Y’know why I can’t lose? Because I believe in myself. Also, we have space guns.