12 Insane First Drafts Of Famous Movies

9. The One Where Marty McFly Tried To Kill Himself - Back To The Future

The Movie We Know...

The greatest movie of the 1980s? Possibly, anyway. Robert Zemeckis' feel-good, intoxicating time travel caper packed in bags of charm, two irresistibly likeable lead performances and a compelling but simple story of redemption.

But, What We Almost Got...

An accidental time travel adventure kicked off by a suicide attempt, apparently.

In the first treatment (which was titled Spaceman From Pluto, quite horrifically), the time machine was built into a car wash and a depressed Marty McFly only discovered its powers when he went in to kill himself. This was literally classed as a good idea "for way longer" than it should have been, according to writer Bob Gale, until everyone realised it wasn't the best tone.

On top of that, everyone in the past originally kept confusing Marty for an alien (because Universal had just seen the success of E.T. and had no imagination) and the ending included Doc Brown sending Marty back to the future in a fridge thanks to a nuclear explosion. That would be way too stupid to include in a movie, right Indiana?