Originally intended as a feature in me and Audrey Farnsworth‘s Step Up Franchise with Me article, but we just had so many terrible ideas it needed to be its own thing. Feel free to drop us YOUR Step Up movie pitches in the comments.
Step Up Into the Mummy’s Tomb
A mysterious new student named “Clarker” enrolls at Baltimore’s Only Dance High School and he is dressed like an adventurer from the 1920s who carries around a briefcase. Everyone makes fun of him about this until one day at lunch, he opens the briefcase to let out the spirits of two mummies and they all do a choreographed street dance together and it’s the coolest fucking thing anyone has ever seen. Clarker reveals himself to the dance students as the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Imhotep, high priest of ancient Egypt, and tells them that they are all in danger because Imhotep is coming specifically to Maryland because the mummy of his girlfriend, Anck-su-Namun, was recently transferred to a museum there. The students are like “Why are you telling US this?” and “Is Clarker your real name?” and Clarker informs them that it is prophesied that the thing that will for sure kill Imhotep for good, like forever this time, is the perfect choreographed dance performed by equal parts human and mummy. And that yes, Clarker is his real name, why? No reason, they say. So, the dancers and Clarker and the two mummy spirits break into the museum and awaken a few other mummies and all of them rehearse a choreographed number for three months. One of the mummies and one of the students fall in love. Imhotep arrives to awaken his girlfriend to find a huge dance number being performed at him and bursts into flames, dying forever. —Audrey Farnsworth
Step Up the Volcano
A volcano is slowly erupting in Hawaii and will potentially kill every single person living there. Government agencies are at a loss, because dodging the shooting lava is near impossible without precise movement and timing. That’s when Billy Bob Thorton (reprising his role from Armageddon) comes in. Due to the stress of losing Michael Clarke Duncan, Owen Wilson and not so much Bruce Willis in space, Thorton has left NASA to work a much less stressful job with the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory….OR SO HE THOUGHT. When news of the erupting volcano hits, he remembers a YouTube video his grandson, played by Room‘s Jacob Tremblay, showed him of the Las Vegas dance competition from Step Up All In. Much like sending miners to do an astronaut’s job in space, he decides to send LMNTRIX (the main dance crew) to step up the volcano in a way that can dodge the quick and unpredictable oozing lava and seal the volcano once they get to the top with every unsold DVD copy of Born From a Boombox. Moose, Channing Tatum, Sean, Andie, Violet, Hair, Monster, Jenny Kiddo, Gauge and the Santiago Twins are back to Step Up the Volcano, so the beautiful and resilient state of Hawaii can step up to their future. – Michael Margetis
Step Up to Responsibility
A banker who used to be a dancer and was in none of the previous movies, literally no one knows him, the actor who plays him doesn’t even have a name, is promoted to the manager of his bank, but when he sees a flash mob dance on the street one morning on his way to the office, it ignites something within him that died a long time ago…dance. He keeps trying to manage the bank but gets distracted by a tiny dancer on his shoulder, his inner voice, telling him to stop managing the bank and start dancing again. “I can’t quit my job, dude,” he tells the tiny dancer on his shoulder, to which the small dancer replies, “THERE’S NO DANCE IN MATH!” The banker puts the tiny dancer into a little sack and shoves him into a bank safe and continues to work at the bank. This doesn’t work because the safe begins glowing and explodes, and 71 tiny dancers burst out because the tiny dancer has cloned himself. They begin dancing the smallest, yet hugest, choreographed dance inside of the lobby of the bank. Tiny dancers are everywhere, on the chairs, on the lamps, on the bank desks. This terrifies all of the bank customers at first, but then winning them over, and then EVERYONE is dancing in the bank, together. That’s when the banker realizes that math and bank and dance aren’t so unalike, and the bank becomes the first dancing back in the history of the planet, where people go to do their cashing as well as shake their legs and asses. Everyone is so glad forever and the banker can do both dancing AND responsibility, every day, here at the bank.—Audrey Farnsworth
Step Back: 1781
After his shitty dance documentary Born From a Boombox massively tanks, Step Up‘s most unlikeable protagonist, Luke Katcher, needs to find inspiration and quick. Distraught and feeling like he has nothing left to offer the world, he calls up Moose, now an award-winning architect, for help. Moose says he’s been working on a top secret government contract involving time travel. Luke, because he’s a selfish asshole, bullies Moose into breaking several federal laws to use the time machine to send the Step Up crew back to 1781 Vienna. Their mission? Hook up with the grandest music mack daddy of them all, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Completely abandoning his life, career and his pregnant wife Camille, Moose succumbs to peer pressure and takes the entire crew back to 18th century Austria. While there, the crew frightens town people with their dance skills and electronic music, and are quickly put on trial for witchcraft. Reprising his role as Emperor Joseph II, famed pedophile Jeffrey Jones, wants the crew executed for using waaayyyyyy too many notes, but the Emperor of Music, Mozart (played by singer Sam Smith) disagrees. Completely blown away by the innovation break dancing and party remixes present, Mozart decides to write a piece for the dancers that harmoniously marries classical elegance with electronic funk. The townspeople of Vienna do a complete 180 and praise the piece. Realizing there’s not much left for him in 1781 Vienna, except for maybe syphilis and debt, Mozart decides to return back to 2015 NYC with the crew. Once back, Moose is thrown in a windowless federal jail cell for the rest of his life while Luke, Mozart and the rest of the gang top the pop charts. Basking in his new found success and reflecting on how differently things were going for him just a week ago, Luke realizes that sometimes in order to truly Step Up, you have to Step Back. – Michael Margetis
Step RIGHT Up To The Circus
Bill (Peter Gallagher), Emily’s dad from Step Up Revolution, has since quit real estate and joined a touring circus, working his way up the ladder to become its top clown. When the Big Top arrives in Miami, the dance crew THE MOB, including Emily, get tickets to go see it and support him (they’re all friends now since he gave up trying to tear down Miami’s small businesses and replace them with hotels). While performing in the show, Bill gets a text message on his Apple Watch right in the middle of his clown act alerting him that the man who took over his position plans to build a Marriott over the entirety of Miami. He falls off the gigantic ball he is balancing his clown body on and breaks his leg. THE MOB rushes the stage (?) to help him, and they all—all of them—carry him backstage, where he alerts them of the news. One of his clown friends exclaims, “That’s crazy, it’s not like we need our circus tent to be on all of Miami in order for it to be successful,” and Emily is like, “That’s it, though,” and they come up with a plan to beat the real estate villain, played by Phil Collins, at his own game by making the circus tent encompass all of Miami BEFORE his Marriott can do that. “We can’t do that, we don’t have enough circus performers to take up all that space,” Bill the injured clown says, and The Mob all stands up and says, “You do now,” and THEY join the circus. What happens next is this: All of Miami is destroyed as a Marriott and a Huge Circus Tent are built, larger and larger until they’re pressed up against each other. The dancers’ dancing is so powerful that it creates a great wind the circus tent somehow engulfs the Marriott, eating it like a huge amoeba and dragging it into the sea. The city is completely demolished, but at least Big Hotel has lost and dance has won. —Audrey Farnsworth
Step Up 2 the Furious
The streets of Miami run rampant with dance crews from the House of Pirates to the House of Samurai, but their turf is threatened when Dominic Torretto (Vin Diesel) and the Fast Gang come into town. The abandoned night streets of Miami just aren’t big enough to house both twenty-person dance crews and six-car street races and an accident occurs. After getting hit with Letty’s (Michelle Rodriguez) NAS-powered Dodge Intrepid, Moose winds up in the hospital on life support. The House of Pirates vow revenge on Torretto’s crew but soon realize sick dance moves don’t really stack up against 5,000 pound cars driven by career criminals. When all is lost for the dancers, a common ground enemy appears in the form of Peter Gallagher‘s character, Bill, from Step Up Revolution. After having a falling out with his daughter over a No Doubt gang bang in the lobby of his hotel, Bill vows to turn every available bit of abandoned street into resort property. Seeing limited dance and racing options, the Fast gang and all the dance houses join up to sour the real estate deal and frame Bill for embezzlement. What ensues is an elaborate 25 step plan that involves Hobbs and Shaw (The Rock and Jason Statham) posing as rival Cuban land developers led by Roman (Tyrese) posing as former president and Mar-A-Lago superstar, Donald J. Trump in white face, the House of Pirates posing as the Harlem Globetrotters on a tour of the resort and through a miracle of reverse engineering, Hobbs’s Samoan relatives turning Bill’s flagship resort location into a 700,000 ton sports car, that drives around the country destroying/crashing into other soulless multi-billion dollar resort properties before self-destructing by driving itself into the ocean and exploding. This Summer, the family gets bigger with the best cross-over movie you never knew you needed. – Michael Margetis
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