A 1985 Back to the Future Poster Just Defied Expectations, and Left Some Iconic Rivals Behind
When it comes to film memorabilia auctions, items linked to the Star Wars franchise are often hard to beat. Toys, props, costumes, and everything else linked to George Lucas’ 1977 movie saga is a goldmine in collectors’ circles. Yet the space opera has been bested in one unexpected category: movie posters. At a recent Heritage Auctions sale, an original 1985 rolled one-sheet poster for Back to the Future sold for $3,500, comfortably beating not one but four different Star Wars posters from the original trilogy. The highest any of the Star Wars offerings reached was $1,600, with others failing to break $1,000. When all was said and done, the same money that the Back to the Future poster closed on could have almost bought all four pieces from the galaxy far, far away, in one of those rare cases when Star Wars is not the star of the show.
The Back to the Future poster is not lacking in its own iconic nature. The standard 27 by 41 inch one-sheet, listed as a rolled, very fine to near-mint condition example, is the instantly recognizable artwork of Drew Struzan that has been on the front of every cinema screening, every video, and every DVD produced of the movie. The image shows Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly checking his watch, with one foot inside the open gull-wing doors of the DeLorean, the tires blazing trails from his time-traveling escapades. For anyone who was around to see the movie when it came out in 1985, the poster is up there with some of the greatest movie posters of the decade, as the artwork defined the entire movie in that single shot. Struzan himself was ironically also involved in working on posters for Star Wars, as well as the Indiana Jones movies, and The Goonies.
Why Back to the Future Beat the Galaxy Far, Far Away
All of this does not mean that the Star Wars franchise has lost its appeal for collectors. There are so many factors that can go into determining why an item sells for a certain price at auction that it is never easy to say what prevented the Star Wars items from reaching higher totals. While it is likely a case of the wrong buyers at the wrong time, the deciding factor could be that the near-mint classification on the Back to the Future print was enough to persuade buyers to pay out just that bit more than they originally planned to get their hands on the 41-year-old piece in such good condition. Then, of course, there is the nature of the film itself, as Back to the Future has ingrained itself into pop culture as much as any movie of the 1980s.
Back to the Future was the highest-grossing movie of 1985, became the launchpad for a trilogy that managed to completely reframe itself with three very different time-period settings, and has never lost its relevance and standing as one of the most perfect movies of Robert Zemeckis’ career. From flying hoverboards to an almost prophetic parody of Donald Trump, the Back to the Future franchise became the source of continuous parallels with the 2015 seen in the second movie and produced dozens of memes decades before they became commonplace in online communication. Thanks to that kind of presence today, it is not hard to see why someone would want to purchase and preserve the poster of the movie that started it all, in as good a condition as you could hope to find. While Star Wars will likely win out in future auctions where props from the saga are available, this was a battle won by time rather than space.
