7 Famous Movie Scenes That Only Existed To Save Money
6. Back To The Future: Marty's Lightning-Fast Exit
Marty's escape from 1955 with the help of a DeLorean, some plutonium and a lightning bolt is one of the greatest exits in cinema history, but it would never have existed if director Robert Zemeckis's budgetary demands had been met.
The filmmaker's initial script, which he co-wrote with Bob Gale, used an atomic blast to send Marty home, rather than a glorified weather experiment, so it sounds like Back to the Future dodged a nuclear bullet here.
Apparently, Doc Brown's sidekick originally drove the time machine out to the Nevada Desert in the final act, straight into the heart of a nuclear bomb test to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of power time travel requires.
Great Scott, does this sound bad! Had Back to the Future been granted the necessary funds to film this ending, it would have been ridiculed more than the fridge-nuking scene from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Since when can a DeLorean - or any car, for that matter - withstand all that heat, blast and radiation?
One budget cut later, Zemeckis and Gale had to come up with a less expensive way of sending Marty back to the present, and the rest is history.