The movie was released on July 18, 1985
Michael J. Fox was feeling the power of love.
On Sunday, Aug. 10, Fox, 64, attended a 40th anniversary screening of Back to the Future at Southampton Playhouse in Southampton, N.Y. The event included a rare screening of the movie in IMAX, and afterward, Fox took part in a screening conversation moderated by Southampton Playhouse Artistic Director Eric Kohn.
The Back to the Future showing was part of the Playhouse’s ’80s Blockbuster Essentials screening series, which included The Terminator and E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. On Instagram, the theater shared that they also had a DeLorean on site for fans to take photos with before the screening.
Back to the Future hit theaters on July 3, 1985. In addition to Fox as Marty McFly — a high school student who goes back in time and changes both his parents’ lives and his future — the movie also starred Christopher Lloyd as Emmett “Doc” Brown, Lea Thompson as Lorraine Baines-McFly, Crispin Glover as George McFly and Thomas F. Wilson as Biff Tannen. The movie became a smash hit, bringing in over $380 million at the box office. It also won an Oscar, with four total nominations. Huey Lewis and the News’ song from the movie, “The Power of Love,” also became a No. 1 hit.
Back to the Future had two sequels: 1989’s Back to the Future Part II and 1990’s Back to the Future Part III. The film was also adapted into a 2023 Broadway musical.
Back in May, Fox announced that he’d be releasing a memoir, Future Boy, this fall. In the book, he’ll dive into when he was filming Back to the Future and his beloved sitcom Family Ties at the same time.
He told PEOPLE about that period of his life, “ ‘The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.’ I didn’t say that, Einstein did. I wonder if even Albert could make sense of my life in the first months of 1985, when time went rogue and took me with it. What was it like? In a word: busy.”
“As we approach the 40th anniversary of Back to the Future, my thoughts turn to my adventures as a younger man,” he said. “This book has basically become a time machine for me, but unlike the DeLorean, there’s plenty of room for anyone who’d like to climb in for the ride.”
In Back to the Future, Fox as Marty plays a red ES-345 Gibson Guitar at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance, rocking out with “Johnny B. Goode.” That guitar has been missing since filming wrapped, and Gibson launched a quest this summer to find it.
Thompson, 64, told PEOPLE in June that she has no clue what happened to it. “When we made [the first] Back to the Future, we didn’t even think we were going to make a sequel,” she explained. “There was no sequel deal, there was no concept of that. I mean, that’s how long ago it was. So people weren’t like Star Wars taking the props and everything. I only have the dress and the shoes and the jewelry from the prom.”
“I have no idea how [the guitar] slipped through people’s hands. I mean, the first thing I thought was maybe one of the prop masters had it … but then I knew it was super expensive … so it had to go somewhere,” she added.