this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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Now that I think of it, it'd be almost impossible to make the movie funny and instead it would sound like a conservative ranting about how they got cancelled on the Internet for calling someone gay.
Depends on how it's handled. While I think your version is the most likely outcome, especially considering the creative team are a bunch of aging Gen Xrs, the reason the original escaped the pitfalls we are talking about here is that Austin's 60s sensibilities are the butt of the joke, not the advancement of societal norms so often decoratively labeled as "political correctness". The movie is about the character learning to adapt to the times, and not the character demanding the times return to the 60s status quo.
Really though, I think they already sort of made the movie we are talking about here, and it turned out fantastic. The 21 Jump Street movies were basically what we are describing, just without time travel shenanigans. Channing Tatum's character, who was hot shit at his high school in the 90s, returns to high school 20 years later and finds that the things that made him popular are no longer cool and he has to learn to adapt to changed circumstances. Obviously that one is specifically satirizing the change in school culture post-90s, but it works on a general level too I think.
Little Demon also does this bit. Chrissy (the Antichrist) is hanging out with the cool girls at high school. Who, this being the 2020s, are wiccan social justice warriors. Chrissy's dad Satan (played by Danny DeVito) is very mad about this, and decides to help her friend Bennigan become popular at school so he can talk her out of being cool. First he tries telling everyone that Bennigan slept with a hot teacher, but this just leads to the teacher getting arrested and everyone feeling sorry for Bennigan. Then he tries getting Bennigan to prank the skater hooligans, but Bennigan refuses and gets them to open up about their feelings instead, which is what actually makes him popular.
Maybe if he has a new partner who's your standard straight-laced FBI guy, and Austin sees him kissing a man and thinks it might compromise the mission only to find out that's his partner's husband. Maybe have Austin meet the guy's kids first, too. I think it could be done, since not everybody from the 90s had that hard a time with it.
Austin, the character, also has the advantage of being written as fully committing to the free love swinger movement of the 60s. It would not stretch credulity if his 90s era handlers were paranoid about Austin finding out his partner is a gay man, but Austin himself is completely nonplussed by the news. Hell, he could even allude to having same-sex experiences of his own ("You know, when you are at the bottom of an orgy pile, you don't always know where your bits and bobs are going, and you certainly don't care. Yeah, baby!")