Back to the Future Writer Would Rewrite Two Key Moments

Bob Gale, who wrote Back to the Future, has been thinking about what he'd change about the first film if he could go back and tinker with it — a fitting thought experiment for the man behind one of cinema's most beloved time-travel stories.

Gale identified two things he'd handle differently, both tied to decisions that rippled through the sequels. The first concerns Jennifer Parker, Marty McFly's girlfriend. Gale has said he wouldn't have included her in the DeLorean at the end of the first film if he'd known the story would continue beyond that initial adventure. It's an interesting bit of hindsight: a small narrative choice that, once the sequels were greenlit, became a thread that needed managing across the trilogy.

The second change runs deeper into character. Gale would have introduced the "chicken" insult earlier, planting it in the first film itself. That particular taunt becomes central to Back to the Future Part II and Part III, where it's used to provoke Marty and expose a character flaw — his inability to resist being called a coward. By seeding it in the original film, Gale suggests, the sequels would have had stronger thematic groundwork. The flaw would feel less like it emerged from nowhere and more like something that was always part of who Marty is.

It's the kind of reflection that comes with time and the benefit of seeing how a story unfolds across multiple installments. Gale wasn't writing the first film knowing it would become a trilogy, so these feel like the observations of someone who's had decades to think about narrative architecture and character consistency. Neither change would have altered the heart of what made that first film work, but both speak to how thoughtfully constructed the sequels became, and how a few small adjustments might have made the whole arc even tighter.

Source: GeekTyrant