Rear window Alfred Hitchcock

Before sunrise & sunset but not before midnight

Is Back to the Future (1985) a genuinely perfect film, or just the one we're all too fond of to mark down honestly? Welcome back to the booth at Mate Night, where we're re-ranking the IMDb Top 250 A to Z until someone finally invites us to Cannes.

Fred went 9.1 and refused to blink — it's Back to the Future, stick the landing. Jambo came in at 8.4, docked partly because rewatching Parts II and III soured it: Zemeckis never wanted to film the future, made a caricature of it instead, and Part II is irritating for it. Jambo still rates Jaws and Jurassic Park above it, while admitting this one has the better story.

Then the production, which was a mess. Eric Stoltz sacked five weeks into shooting. Michael J. Fox doing a TV show all week and this at weekends, sleep-deprived the whole way through. Crispin Glover picking fights with Zemeckis over an ending he read as "money makes you happy", then suing over his likeness. Forty-six rejections before Spielberg came on as producer.

In this episode:

• 🎬 9.1 vs 8.4 — should the sequels count against the first film?
• 🍳 Everything in focus — how the opening breakfast scene lands the plutonium gag before anyone speaks
• 🛸 Spaceman from Pluto — the retitle memo Spielberg killed with one very polite reply
• 🕰️ 21 October 2015 — what Marty would actually have found: a real Jaws 19 trailer, self-lacing Nikes, and thousands of people already dressed as him
• 📊 The official Mate Night score — 8.8, level with 12 Angry Men, Apocalypse Now and Dune Part Two, and 10th on the Master List

Strap in, strap on, and let's find the one true score.

#BackToTheFuture #MichaelJFox #MateNight #FilmPodcast #IMDbTop250