BACK TO THE FUTURE The original ending saw Marty harness the power of a nuclear bomb

In the original 1985 film script Back to the Futurescreenwriter Bob Gale intended for Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to travel back in time by driving to a nuclear test site in Nevada and harnessing the power of a nuclear explosion during a bomb test.

The idea was dropped after Gale and the director Robert Zemeckis realized that that scene alone would cost over $ 1 million to shoot. The scene was actually all scripted and it looks like it was going to be great! I really love this original concept for Marty traveling back in time! But in the end, what we got is a bolt of lightning hitting the clock tower. Gale told Collider:

“The idea that the DeLorean was nuclear-powered literally needed to harness nuclear power to send the time machine back into the future. Bob. [Zemeckis] and I had seen the documentary The Atomic Café, a film called The Atomic Kid that we pay homage to on the city theater marquee in 1955 – one of the most perverse films ever made … We were obsessed with the idea of ​​’Hey’ Wouldn’t that be cool what if we could recreate one of these cities and blow it up? ‘ And you know, hey, ok, yeah, you’re a writer, you can write anything in the script you want. So we wrote this elaborate sequence in and in the original version, the time machine was built into a refrigerator that was a time chamber. And that was where Marty would be when the nuclear blast went off. “

When he talked about cutting the scene, he said:

“When it came time to cut the budget – and that was before they picked Eric Stoltz – the studio said, ‘Hey guys, you can make the movie, but cut $ 1 million.’ Bob and I looked at the script for a long time and said, ‘What are we going to cut? How do we save $ 1 million? ‘ And the most expensive thing was to go there and build this city. And we said well, if we could eliminate it, if we could cut out the place to build and build a city and do something in a place we already have, namely the backlot, that would easily save us $ 1 million. Over a weekend we spent time wandering the backlot going back and forth to our offices and invented the whole clock tower sequence. Pop into Indiana Jones 4 and you’ll see that Steven Spielberg was inspired by the original Back to the Future ending.

I like the ending we got, but the nuclear test site would have been so much more awesome! You can watch how the scene would have unfolded in the video below with the original storyboards. But it doesn’t include the refrigerator. This scene sees Marty leading the DeLorean in an atomic explosion.