41 Years Later, The Greatest Sci-Fi Adventure Quote Still Defines the Genre

Published Oct 27, 2026, 12:05 AM EDT Shawn Van Horn is a Senior Author for Collider. He's watched way too many slasher movies over the decades, which makes him an aficionado on all things Halloween and Friday the 13th. Don't ask him to choose between Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees because he can't do it. He grew up in the 90s, when Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, and TGIF were his life, and still watches them religiously to this day. Larry David is his spirit animal. His love for entertainment spreads to the written word as well. He has written two novels and is neck deep in the querying trenches. He is also a short story maker upper and poet with a dozen publishing credits to his name. He lives in small town Ohio, where he likes to watch professional wrestling and movies. After starting out as cheesy '50s and '60s B-movies, where a scientist sets off in some goofy-looking time machine, and gets stuck in a predictable past world where they have to fight monsters, time travel movies began to transform in the '70s and '80s with more sophisticated offerings like Time After Time and The Terminator. And then, 1985's Back to the Future arrived. Robert Zemeckis' film took what audiences already knew about the subgenre and turned it on its head, with Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, and company creating an unforgettable comedy adventure like viewers had never seen before. Not only was Back to the Future the biggest box office hit of the year, but its final line hinted at what was to come for the franchise and beyond. The End of 'Back to the Future' Delivered an Unforgettable Quote In 1985, Michael J. Fox was arguably the biggest TV star in the world, thanks to his portrayal of Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties. He was also the final and most important piece in Back to the Future. The movie had many struggles while getting from page to screen, with studios like Disney rejecting what they saw as a plot that suggested incest, and the original Marty McFly, Eric Stoltz, getting fired for playing the lead too seriously. Director Robert Zemeckis wanted his film to be more fun, as already seen in his and writer Bob Gale's choice to turn their time machine from something unmovable to a badass DeLorean, which could move its characters beyond usual time travel limitations. Back to the Future is indeed a time travel movie, but it's so much more than its subgenre. It works because of its characters, with Fox as the cool teen everyone wanted to know, and Christopher Lloyd as the eccentric but lovable Doctor Emmett Brown. Throw in phenomenal performances from Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson as Marty's future parents, and Thomas F. Wilson as the quintessential bully Biff, and you have an exciting story built around grounded people. But at the end, it all comes back to the car and what it can do. With its own well-built backstory regarding how it functioned, the DeLorean was a character in its own right. It needed 1.21 gigawatts of power to work, and the car had to hit 88 mph to launch itself forward or backward and time. During this process, the DeLoren moved like a normal car. But at the end of the movie, Marty and his girlfriend, Jennifer (Claudia Wells) are picked up by a Doc Brown from the future, who is there to take them to 2015 to save the children who have yet to be born. When Marty lets Doc know that they don't have enough road to get up to 88 mph, the scientist smiles and puts on his futuristic shades, confidently saying, "Roads. Where we're going, we don't need roads." At that, the DeLorean moves upward and flies through the air. The 'Back to the Future' Sequels Delivered on Doc Brown's Promise Image via Universal Pictures Doc's line and the flying car reveal was the perfect ending to Back to the Future. It's not only a setup for a sequel and eventual trilogy where anything is possible, it's a line which goes beyond setup – it is an exciting promise. Back to the Future showed us things we'd never seen before. If humans could travel backward in time and meet teenage versions of their parents, why couldn't we go forward too, or to any point in time we wanted? Just about any story imaginable could happen in this world and be plausible. There were no roads to restrain them. Where Back to the Future was going, the impossible was now believable. The sequels, which kept the familiar heroes and villains, refused to play it safe with more of the same. Back to the Future Part II went forward 30 years to 2015, where cars fly, wet clothes can dry themselves, and skateboards now hover. Whatever Zemeckis and Gale could conjure in a world that had yet to happen became reality. In Back to the Future Part III, the franchise went backward a century to 1885 in a clever love letter to Clint Eastwood movies. Although there are restraints when it comes to representing the past that don't pop up when showing the future, the last film in the trilogy still managed to awe audiences while finding a way to get the DeLorean back home in an era where gasoline cars and nuclear capabilities have yet to be created. The Back to the Future franchise opened up a whole new world of possibilities to keep the once-predictable genre grounded without making it stale. There's a reason why sci-fi action movies have taken off in the decades since. Just look at what we have gotten with time travel movies alone: Terminator 2: Judgment Day upped the ante, free from the roads it created for itself in the first movie. Groundhog Day took this and went left with a time loop twist, creating its own subgenre. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Hot Tub Time Machine turned those possibilities into full-fledged comedies. And Event Horizon, Happy Death Day, and Totally Killer found a path through horror. There are no restraining roads in Back to the Future. It's why it and its sequels remain so rewatchable and have been passed down through generations. If they wanted, there could have been several more sequels and audiences would have come back every time to see all new wild adventures. Back to the Future isn't a moment in time. It opened a door of magical possibilities to where Hollywood was going in the future. Back to the Future Release Date July 3, 1985 Runtime 116 minutes Cast Michael J. Fox Marty McFly