Usually, when you hear that the studio slashed a movie’s budget and forced major changes, it’s a bad sign. That’s not the case with Back to the Future, which turned 40 last year. The studio cut the movie’s budget, forcing director Robert Zemeckis to change the ending. Even he agrees it made for a far better moment than the original idea. The movie, one of the best of the ‘80s, has proven incredibly enduring, and I think we can all agree that the ending, with Doc (Christopher Lloyd) up on the clock and Marty (Michael J. Fox) timing his run at 88 mph, is a classic. It was almost very different.
The Original Ending Involved Nukes
As the script was written, the ending involved Doc and Marty breaking into a nuclear test site before a test (remember, this was the 1950s). That was how they were originally planning to harness the 1.21 gigawatts they needed to send Marty and the Delorean back to 1985. According to Zemeckis in an interview on El Rey Network with fellow director Robert Rodriguez, they were planning to build a whole fake town, like the ones you see in the old footage of the tests. Or like you see in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Sorry to bring that up.
Zemeckis explained that just weeks before filming was to commence, Universal cut the budget for the set piece, and the director and the crew were forced to figure out a way to use the courthouse, as that set was already constructed. Of course, what came out of that is movie magic, with Doc connecting the wires just in time for the lightning to strike and Marty to hit the correct speed.
It’s a rare case when cutting the budget forced a creative decision that is in every way superior to the original idea. Zemeckis told Rodriguez:
It was just much, much more romantic and much better for the movie. We having this fight, which really made us angry, actually improved the story… This is the magic of this art form.
That wasn’t the only change during the production, either.
The Most Famous Change Was With The Star
Anyone who’s familiar with the production of Back to the Future, knows that five weeks into production, Zemeckis came to the conclusion that he had to fire the actor playing Marty, Eric Stoltz. Stoltz was playing Marty, of course, and it just wasn’t working, as both sides have acknowledged. Michael J. Fox was brought in, and much of the movie had to be reshot. Once again, a potentially fatal decision turned into a brilliant one, as I can’t imagine anyone but Fox in the role.
Looking back, it’s incredible that Back to the Future, which you can watch with the MGM+ add-on to a Prime subscription, was even finished, much less became the massive box office hit and enduring favorite for so many people. It survived not one, but two massive complications that could have doomed any normal movie. Instead, the corrections make it a classic.