{"id":655759,"date":"2026-10-15T18:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T18:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/655759\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T18:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T18:44:09","slug":"back-to-the-future-is-perfect-but-its-writer-might-change-one-small-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/655759\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Back to the Future’ Is Perfect, But Its Writer Might Change One Small Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"

To many fans, few movies are as perfect as Back to the Future<\/a>. From the first frame to the last, writer-director Robert Zemeckis and his co-writer Bob Gale<\/a> crafted a Swiss watch of a time travel adventure that\u2019s propulsive and filled with pertinent information, and all of it pays off masterfully. That\u2019s why, in 1985, the film was a massive success<\/a>, two sequels came soon after, and we\u2019re still talking about it today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gale himself doesn\u2019t disagree that the screenplay he and Zemeckis crafted is close to perfect. However, over the years, he did realize one thing. When Gale and Zemeckis wrote Back to the Future, they didn\u2019t think about a sequel. Sure, it teed one up, but they didn\u2019t even think about what that could be. \u201cZemeckis has always said, \u2018If I knew we were going to do a second movie, I wouldn\u2019t have put Jennifer in the car,’\u201d Gale said.<\/p>\n

However, she did get in the car, it did get those sequels, and speaking to io9 about his new book (which you can read much, much more about here<\/a>), Gale said that there is one small thing he might change about the original film if he could pop in his own DeLorean and tell himself what happened in Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III.<\/p>\n

\"BackMarty and Doc in Back to the Future. \u00a9 Universal <\/p>\n

\u201cPeople say to me, \u2018Okay, if you were going to redo Back to the Future 1 knowing what\u2019s in Back to the Future 2 and 3, what would you do differently?\u2019 And the only thing that I could ever answer is, in 1955, for Biff to call Marty a chicken, [Marty] say, \u2018 Nobody calls me chicken\u2019 and set that up in the first movie,\u201d Gale said. \u201cBecause when we went to do Part Two, we said Marty needs to have some kind of a character flaw. We see in the first movie that he\u2019s a little bit of a hothead. He\u2019s ready to kind of go at Biff even though he\u2019s too small to be doing that. So we said let\u2019s use that aspect of his personality and make more of a meal out of that and have him respond when anybody calls him a chicken.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, of course, that\u2019s not in the first movie. It\u2019s only in the sequels. Which means it\u2019s not one of the stories Gale recounts in his new book, Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay<\/a>. Gale talks about a lot of other things in the book, though. It\u2019s one of the first screenplay books to reproduce the screenplay at its actual size, with colored page revisions, along with commentary from the co-writer himself. And, while the new book would have been great at any time, Gale thinks releasing it today makes it better than ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book is better today than it would have been if it had been made five years after a movie came out because certain things that we would take for granted back then you can\u2019t do that anymore,\u201d he said. What\u2019s an example? \u201cPeople today, they don\u2019t know what Tab and Pepsi Free are,\u201d Gale said. \u201cSo the book has ads and pictures of what those soft drinks look like, so now you can say, \u2018Okay, that helps me understand this a lot.’\u201d<\/p>\n

But, because the movie is all but perfect, it doesn\u2019t really need too much explanation.<\/p>\n

Back to the Future: The Complete Screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale will be released on October 20 from Insight Editions. It comes not only in a regular edition, but also in a limited edition, which you can read more about here<\/a>, as well as a collector\u2019s edition, which is detailed here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out the best movies and TV shows<\/a> to stream this month and all the upcoming sci-fi, fantasy, and horror books<\/a> that should be on your radar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To many fans, few movies are as perfect as Back to the Future. From the first frame to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":655760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[66184,221309,93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-655759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-bob-gale","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=655759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/655759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/655760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=655759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=655759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=655759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}