The Hilarious Reason Disney Rejected Back to the Future in the Early 1980s: “That’s Horrible!”

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Discussing time travel: It’s mind-blowing to realize that this year’s July 4th weekend will commemorate the 40th anniversary of “Back to the Future” (now available from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment), a massive film on time travel, predating our current century and inspiring future blockbusters like “Avengers: Endgame.

The film “Back to the Future,” starring Michael J. Fox from the popular sitcom “Family Ties” on NBC, skyrocketed him to superstardom by defining a generation’s worth of trendy and future-oriented pop culture themes. In retrospect, it appears inevitable that this movie would be made. Directed by Robert Zemeckis, who won an Oscar, and co-written with Bob Gale, the film perfectly captured the spirit of the 1980s, combining humor, optimism, and relatable teenage worries into a brilliant blend.

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Initially, turning “Back to the Future” from its initial time travel concept into the blockbuster movie we know today was far from certain. In the early ’80s film industry, which leaned more towards raunchy R-rated comedies, studios found numerous excuses to reject the charming sci-fi comedy script that Zemeckis and Gale had written.

After facing rejection over forty times, usually being told that the Back to the Future story seemed excessively innocent and sugary for its trippy sci-fi theme, Gale and Zemeckis decided to take their supposedly family-friendly film pitch directly to Disney, since it’s where family movies are typically produced. However, as Gale shared with Esquire in a 2015 retrospective article marking Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary, Disney also rejected the movie, delivering what might have been the most severe (and arguably funniest) criticism of all.

Expressing disapproval towards a key plot twist in the movie’s midpoint where Marty is sent back to the 1950s and develops romantic feelings for Lorraine (Lea Thompson, who later becomes his mother), Gale stated that a Disney executive found an almost comical yet seemingly incestuous situation problematic.

The pivotal, somewhat inappropriate scene in the movie occurs when Marty is attempting to resist Lorraine’s romantic advances inside a car during the Enchantment Under the Sea dance at Hill Valley in 1955 – a moment where she nearly kisses her future son before (luckily) getting a strange feeling about the whole situation.

‘Can you all be serious? It’s out of the question to produce such a film here. This is Disney, and we’re proposing a movie about incest? The storyline involving a child in a car with his mother is abhorrent!’

Gale shared with Esquire that he and Zemeckis were conscious of the challenging thematic balance in the film’s nearly romantic plot between Marty and his teenage mother, given it was a PG-rated comedy. Yet, they managed to find an elegant solution to address the McFly family’s almost-romance without diluting its significant impact on Marty’s predicament of being trapped in the past.

Gale acknowledged they had taken things as far as possible. They kept the spectators in suspense, but never overstepped boundaries. It was Marty’s mother who stepped back and declared, ‘This is wrong, it’s like kissing my brother.’ What the audience didn’t realize is what her brother was doing that she would make such a comparison. We decided, ‘Let it be, the viewers will accept it, they yearn for it, as they don’t want anything untoward to occur.’

In a tense moment for Marty’s character, viewers surprisingly found a reason to cheer – for once – as two teenagers shared a kiss on screen in the movie. And it’s now common knowledge that Back to the Future, initially left undistributed, eventually made its way onto the big screen. Universal Pictures took up the project with considerable backing from co-executive producer Steven Spielberg.

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2025-07-01 21:46