Despite Back to the Future's overwhelming success upon release, many didn't think the movie would do well — and for a surprising reason. When screenwriters Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis were trying to get Back to the Future made, they had trouble convincing studios to pick up the now iconic time travel movie. Ironically enough, the reason many studios didn't want to finance Back to the Future ended up being one of the contributing factors as to why audiences loved it so much.
In the documentary Back in Time, Back to the Future writer-producer Bob Gale and director of photography Dean Cundey speak about the constant anxieties that studios had when they pitched the movie around Hollywood. In the early 1980s, when Gale and Zemeckis wrote the Back to the Future script, there weren't many time travel movies being made — or rather, there weren't many successful time travel movies being made. Therefore, studios had an understandable amount of trepidation when it came to financing a time travel movie for fear that audiences wouldn't go see it.
Why Back To The Future Did Well Because Time Travel Didn't
Science fiction is a genre with a rich illustrious history to go along with a die-hard fandom, but for whatever reason, up until the mid-1980s, when the first part of the Back to the Future trilogy was released, no time travel movie could help the subgenre break out on a blockbuster level. Therefore, there was an untapped market for time travel that audiences didn't know they wanted. Since no previous time travel movie came close to the success and craftsmanship of Back to the Future, it could write all the rules for a good time travel movie. Simply put, because there were so many previous time travel movie flops, Back to the Future became the golden child of the genre.
Back To The Future Was A Risk (That Paid Off)
In retrospect, a movie about a reclusive, oddball scientist who is inexplicably best friends with an underage boy, who travels back in time in a DeLorean and nearly sleeps with his mother, seems like a ludicrous idea for a family movie. Back to the Future should never have worked. The reason Back to the Future packs such a punch is because the filmmakers were willing to be edgy and take risks — and these risks allowed them to make a movie that unashamedly broke all the rules, and got away with it because it did so with style.
Back to the Future is a movie that subverts a lot of Hollywood storytelling conventions. Marty McFly has no character arc, and there is no explanation as to why Marty and Doc Brown know each other. Yet, it is as close to a perfect movie as possible, despite the fact that so many thought it would fail. Back to the Future was so successful because it was so unconcerned with being like everything else. The filmmakers were more concerned with telling a riveting tale that contained colorful characters in a rich world, and because of this, Back to the Future is a certified classic.
