Here's looking at you, Casablanca 2

Hollywood is often criticised for its reliance on creatively impotent sequels and reboots, but every now and then an idea will come along that's simply too perfect to ignore. One of those ideas has come along now. Ladies and gentlemen, there's probably going to be a Casablanca 2.

No, really. It might be because this is Casablanca's 70th anniversary, or it might be because there's a carbon monoxide leak at Warner Bros and everyone is working at a noticeably reduced mental capacity, but the idea of a sequel to Casablanca is genuinely being entertained. A treatment entitled Return to Casablanca, written by Casablanca's co-writer Howard Koch in 1980, has been unearthed, and there are plans to use it as the building block for Casablanca 2. Koch's treatment is set in 1961, and involves Rick and Ilsa's son – currently rumoured to be played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt – heading to the Middle East to find his father, falling in love with a character based on Joan Baez, and hunting Nazi outlaws along the way.

That's all well and good, but surely they can do better. This is 2012, after all. Times have changed, and Koch's treatment needs to change with it. Nowhere, for example, does it suggest that Rick's son is one of the world's greatest practitioners of parkour. That clearly needs to be rectified for the final version. And perhaps the young man could win back the love of his estranged father by roping in a ragtag gang of locals to perform an impromptu flashmob dance to the Magnum PI theme tune outside Rick's Cafe. And I can't help but notice that there aren't any animals, either. Everyone likes animals. Maybe one of the characters could have a dog. A kooky dog. A kooky dog that can speak English. No, wait, a kooky dog that can speak English and is also a robot. He could breakdance, too, because that'd really pop in the 3D conversion. Brilliant. Now we're cooking.

That's assuming Warner Bros will go with the Koch treatment for Casablanca 2. It might not, given that it's less of a sequel and more a separate story set within the same universe. Perhaps it'd be more of a moneyspinner to take the Hangover 2 route and basically just remake Casablanca note for note under the pretense that it's a sequel. That could work. Having just watched Ilsa fly away, Rick could then meet another beautiful and mysterious Norwegian ex-lover with whom he'd also previously had a torrid affair in Paris while she thought her imprisoned husband was dead, and the whole story could play out in a perfect replica of the original. Only, you know, this time it could be set in Bangkok.

And why stop there? If Casablanca 2 turns out to be a success, belated and ill-advised sequels to untouchable golden age movies might just be the next big thing. Maybe next they could make a sequel to Citizen Kane, where Charles Foster Kane could magically come back to life and start a new career as a rapper. Or The Eighth Seal, where Max von Sydow challenges Death to a game of Just Dance 4 on the Nintendo Wii. Or maybe a sequel to Sunset Boulevard, where someone at Warner Bros in the present day finds Norma Desmond's long-forgotten screenplay in a pile and mistakenly believes that it'd be a good idea to turn it into a movie, one that possibly stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Actually, maybe not that last one. The premise is too ridiculous.