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Diehard cinephiles have heard countless stories about how some of the greatest films ever made initially struggled to get a green light before becoming cult classics. From Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, to Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, to Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, it’s a surprisingly long list. Today, we are talking about one such movie. It’s a film that is regarded by many movie buffs as the most entertaining and rewatchable movie ever made. Amazingly, it was rejected dozens of times before finally going into production. That film is the 1985 sci-fi adventure classic Back to the Future.
Why Was Back to the Future Rejected Over 40 Times?
According to a report by Esquire, Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel film went through a production nightmare and was rejected by studios more than forty times. After getting a lukewarm response from Columbia Pictures, Zemeckis and co-writer Bob Gale pitched the project to numerous studios, only to be turned down repeatedly. Many executives thought it was “too sweet, too nice” and didn’t fit the bill.
More Rejections – And Who Finally Produced The Film?
One Disney executive famously objected to the plotline in which the younger version of Marty’s mother (from 1955) is romantically interested in Marty (from 1985). Others felt that time-travel movies simply didn’t make money, as there hadn’t been a major box-office success in that genre at the time. Eventually, Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment stepped in to produce the film, and the rest, as they say, is history.
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