#Why Disney Turned Down The Opportunity To Make Back To The Future

“Back to the Future” is considered today to be one of the more family-friendly films to come out of the 1980s, especially considering many of them probably wouldn’t get greenlit today without being too controversial. But Disney didn’t see it that way when the pitch for the film came their way. And, well, we kind of can’t blame them for this one. 

One of the major plot points of the film has Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) trying to ensure that his time travel back to 1955 doesn’t mess up his parents falling in love in high school, and, subsequently, his birth. However, Marty ends up catching his teenaged mom, Lorraine’s (Lea Thompson) eye after her dad, his grandfather, accidentally hits him with the car instead of his would-be dad, George (Crispin Glover). At a later point in the movie, at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, she kisses him. 

Screenwriter Bob Gale explained in an interview to CNN:

“We went in to meet with an executive and he says, ‘Are you guys nuts? Are you insane? We can’t make a movie like this. You’ve got the kid and the mother in his car! It’s incest. This is Disney. It’s too dirty for us!'”

The irony was that other studios thought the film was too innocent for them. 

“‘There’s a lot of sweetness to this. It’s too nice, we want something raunchier like ‘Porky’s,'” Bob Gale said, summarizing different studios’ reactions to his script. These were the same executives who would then suggest he and co-writer Robert Zemeckis take the film to, who else? Disney.

Fortunately, Steven Spielberg became interested in the film, and the rest was movie history, with “Back to the Future” finding its permanent home under the executive producer at Universal Studios.