Despite all its shortcomings, Steven Spielberg’s Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gave fans one of the most iconic moments in the entire franchise, which sees Indy taking shelter from a nuclear blast in a refrigerator. Interestingly, the seeds for this scene were sown decades back during the scripting of one of the most influential films of all time.
Like the film itself, the opening and ending of Back to the Future are iconic, and it’s hard to imagine them otherwise. But this was almost the case until Universal cut the budget for the film.
The Budget Cut for Back to the Future Became a Blessing in Disguise
While in most cases, a reduced budget often impacts a project negatively, in Back to the Future‘s case, it was certainly a blessing in disguise. Opposed to the iconic watch tower ending that we got, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale originally penned an entirely different conclusion to the film. Inspired by the 1954 flick, The Atomic Kid, the duo initially planned to build one of the towns from that film and blow it up in an atomic explosion.
They further intended to incorporate the time machine into a refrigerator, and once Marty entered it, the town would’ve blown up.
We were obsessed with the idea of ‘Hey wouldn’t it be cool if we could recreate one of these towns and blow it up?’ And you know, hey, okay yeah you’re a writer, you can write anything in the script that you want. So we wrote this elaborate sequence in and in the original version, the time machine was built into a refrigerator which was a time chamber. And that was where Marty was gonna be when the nuclear blast went off.
However, due to budget cuts, they had to revamp the entire ending, but fortunately, the idea was reused years later.
Steven Spielberg Held on to That Idea for Decades
Before ending up at Universal, the film’s script was rejected by many notable studios, and when the film was eventually greenlit, Gale and Zemeckis were asked to trim down the budget by $1M.
When it came time to cut the budget – and this was before we cast Eric Stoltz – the studio said, ‘Hey you guys can make the movie, but cut $1 million out.’ Bob and I looked long and hard at the script and said, ‘What do we cut? How do we save $1 million?’
Considering that their initial planned ending would’ve cost the most, they eventually resorted to trimming it down from the film. Moreover, after Eric Stoltz, who was initially hired to play the lead, was fired, Universal demanded further budget cuts, which pushed the duo to cut the original opening for the film, resulting in the “great long tracking shot that we see in Doc Brown’s laboratory“.
Decades after the film’s success, Steven Spielberg, who served as a producer on Back to the Future, finally brought the idea to the big screen with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Back to the Future trilogy is available to rent on Apple TV.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is available to stream on Disney Plus.
