If Eric Stoltz Starred In Back To The Future Instead Of Michael J. Fox
Gotta get back in time.
There isn’t a single Michael J. Fox role that I can think of that would have been made better with Eric Stoltz in his place. Maybe, just maybe, it would have worked for Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners, since that lead character was kind of a jerk.
But I still get shivers when I think about what Back to the Future would have been like with Stoltz as Marty McFly. That being said, I don’t have feelings nearly as strong about Claudia Wells replacing Melora Hardin in the role of Jennifer.
Filmmaker David Guy Levy (Would You Rather?) is a big Back to the Future fan, enough so that he’s spent 12 years working on a revisionist comic book that presents the Back to the Future recasting from an original angle.
Levy was inspired by a 2001 interview where Back to the Future screenwriter/producer Bob Gale shared his regrets over having to recast Hardin based purely on her being taller than the newly recast Fox.
So now we have Back to Back to the Future, a six-part comic series in which Gale and Hardin travel back in time to visit the first film’s production. Instead of switching roles, they allow things to play out as originally conceived.
“All I could think after reading this statement was that here was the man who wrote the most popular films ever made about time travel, and he had this major regret,” Levy explained about Back to the Future. “So I decided I wanted to tell the story where he gets to go back in time himself, through a parody of the films he helped create, and right this wrong.”
In this Back to the Future story, Bob Gale (co-writer of the BTTF films) and a man named Hardin accidentally travel back in time and end up on the set of the first Back to the Future movie. However, in this timeline, Eric Stoltz was cast as Marty McFly instead of Michael J. Fox. It’s a meta-fictional “what if” tale that allows fans to ponder how one of the most beloved film franchises may have played out under different circumstances.
