The great 'Back to the Future' web hoax

News that July 5, 2010 was the day Marty McFly and the 'Doc' travel to in Back to the Future II spread like wildfire across the internet this week — and pop-savvy nerds around the world celebrated it as "Future Day." Unfortunately, they were misinformed: The British movie magazine Total Film intially made an honest mistake about the date in a Twitter message, then — "for a bit of fun" — digitally altered a frame from the movie to "prove" themselves right. This rumor was anything but fun, says Catherine Shoard at The Guardian. Back to the Future is "a film so intimately wedded to the idea that a split second can make all the difference," that playing fast and loose with its "finely wrought" structure "feels like sacrilege." The only way to overcome this disappointment, says Jen Chaney at The Washington Post, is to "break out your DVD copy" of the movie and travel back to an era "when no one had Photoshop or Twitter." Here's a trailer for Back to the Future II in which the actual "Future Day" — October 21, 2015 – is mentioned at the 00:38 mark:

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up