Back to the Future opened on July 3, 1985, and this year marks 41 years since Robert Zemeckis sent Marty McFly back to 1955 in a modified DeLorean.
Written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale, the film paired Michael J. Fox with Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown and Lea Thompson as Lorraine, and it became the highest-grossing release of 1985, holding the number one box office spot for eleven consecutive weekends.
Gale and Zemeckis spent years trying to get the script financed, and Gale has said it was turned down by more than forty executives across every major studio. The recurring note was that the film was too gentle: several studios wanted something raunchier, in the mold of Porky's. The project only moved forward once Steven Spielberg, who had backed it from early on, gained enough studio leverage after Zemeckis's Romancing the Stone became a hit, and Universal greenlit the film through Amblin Entertainment.
The best-known production wrinkle is the recasting of Marty McFly. Eric Stoltz was the studio's original choice and shot roughly six weeks of footage before Zemeckis and producers concluded his more serious, dramatic reading did not fit the film's comic register, and replaced him with Fox, whom Zemeckis and Gale had wanted from the start. The decision came at real cost: scenes that had taken about four weeks to shoot with Stoltz were redone with Fox in roughly 73 hours.
Back to the Future was received warmly on release, not just as a hit but as a critical success; Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars and compared its view of parents and hometown to Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. That combination, broad popularity and critical respect, has kept it in circulation as a reference point for time-travel plotting and for how a genre film can stay coherent under its own internal rules.
