(Credits: Mark Seliger)
Tue 3 February 2026 18:45, UK
Thanks almost entirely to Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future, Michael J Fox will always be remembered as one of the defining movie stars of the 1980s, which is to be expected when he headlined one of Hollywood’s most timeless blockbusters.
The time-travelling adventure is a stone-cold classic and one of American cinema’s greatest-ever examples of escapist entertainment, and because it continues to captivate new audiences with each generation, Fox’s Marty McFly will remain an enduring icon of the big screen.
If it wasn’t for Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s insistence that the only way a remake and reboot will happen is if they’re six feet under, the trilogy has also been afforded the rare opportunity to retain its magic without the prying eyes and grubby hands of studio executives dusting it off and repurposing it for the modern era.
Even without Back to the Future, though, the actor would have had a stellar decade. Fox broke out in a big way as the star of the sitcom Family Ties, even if he’d rather forget that time the Keaton family went on a cross-continental jaunt to Europe. His first post-Marty move was a pivotal one, and it was something he came to regret.
Fox’s first flick in the immediate aftermath of Back to the Future‘s rousing success was Teen Wolf, a coming-of-age comedy with a lycanthropic twist. It was another monster hit at the box office, recouping its $4 million production budget 20 times over, but the leading man was hardly thrilled with the results.
With the benefit of hindsight, he wished he hadn’t chased another sure-fire smash. “It was already obvious to me that Teen Wolf, filmed a few months prior, was not my magnum opus,” he wrote in his memoir. “One day on the set of the film, the prop guy made me take a few photos holding a chocolate bar so they could show the confectioner who supplied the candy that we had actually used their product in the movie.”
Teen Wolf was shot in late 1984, before he was brought in to replace Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future, so he knew it was a big opportunity. “This would be my first leading role in a movie,” Fox explained. “Albeit a hackneyed one that required me to wear 25 pounds of yak hair. Still, I signed on.” If he’d had an inkling of how big his next production would be, he probably would have done things differently.
“Looking back, I’m not sure why I accepted that role,” he confessed. It was filmed before, but by the time it was released in August 1985, Back to the Future had been playing to packed houses for over seven weeks, and was well on its way to becoming the single biggest box office hit of the year.
Had the timelines been reversed, and his debut as Marty McFly had premiered before the part of Scott Howard in Teen Wolf had been offered to him, you would get the sneaking suspicion that Fox might have turned it down, because it’s not exactly an experience he remembers with any degree of fondness.
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