Doug Belgrad, president of Sony Pictures, has indicated that there will be a Men In Black 4. I suspect this means that he already has the stars on board.

We’re very pleased with the financial performance of Men in Black 3, and we believe it is an ongoing franchise. We’re going to do [another one], but we don’t have clarity yet on how it should be done.

The real difficulty is the time-travel aspect. For Josh Brolin to be in Men in Black 4, he would need to travel to the present or future. The future might be too hard to create and make fun. The present would be boring without a killer story. What about the deep past? Back to when the agency came to be, when the first aliens were spotted on Earth? Perhaps the Prohibition Era?

But there would also need a strong reason for the time travel, and a conundrum. Taking Will back to slave days would be too serious, and too similar to the Wild Wild West disaster. Messing with the future doesn’t really have conundrums…

I vote for a modern day setting, in a foreign land. There are plenty of places where being smartly dressed can be cool – London, Italy, Japan for examples. For the time travel, something tragic happens in the present, and the duo (no Tommy Lee Jones) need to go back in time just one year to prevent it from happening.

But they find they have rewound to a different timeline, a la Fringe, and instead of being secret agents they are recognizable super heroes… Sorry, my writer’s hat is now off again.