Nearly 40 years after Back to the Future was released, the movie’s four core cast members are fortunately still with us. Along with Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd respectively leading the 1985 movie and its two sequels as Marty McFly and Doc Brown, they were accompanied by Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson. The four actors had various opportunities recently to reunite with each other at conventions, and after Lloyd dropped one of their reunion photos on social media, he asked for a specific amount of likes on it that Back to the Future fans will likely be able to guess.
Although Christopher Lloyd didn’t state when this photo was taken, it was originally posted on Instagram by Thomas F. Wilson over the weekend, when they were all at Fan Expo Chicago (which follows six months after their Fan Expo Portland appearance). As you’ll see in Lloyd’s reshare from Twitter below, he wanted to see if the tweet could get more than 88,000 likes, and, well, that goal was more than accomplished.
Can we get 88k likes? The past says so… pic.twitter.com/yKTWOD18i2August 14, 2023
88,000 likes was a solid goal to set, as Doc Brown’s spruced-up DeLorean needed to reach 88 miles per hour in order to time travel using the flux capacitor. Still, given that Lloyd has more than 433,000 followers on Twitter alone, along with Back to the Future having a passionate fanbase, it was to be expected that this photo wouldn’t have any trouble circulating around the social media platform (which is now being branded as X). At the time of this writing, the post has secured over 239,000 likes, over triple what the actor was asking for. I'm eager to see where the amount ends up settling after a week or two.
We haven’t seen Christopher Lloyd, Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson together on the big screen since 1990’s Back to the Future Part III, with the latter two chiefly appearing in the roles of Maggie McFly and Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen, respectively. While the franchise as a whole has stayed afloat through video games, comic books and other media, the chances of Back to the Future 4 happening are almost zero at this point, not the least of which is because Fox has retired from acting due to facing more difficulties from his Parkinson’s. So with a Back to the Future-set reunion off the table, any time these four get to cross paths again in real life is most welcome.
If you’re interested in streaming the Back to the Future trilogy, all three movies can currently be accessed with a Live TV add-on to your Hulu subscription. Otherwise, feel free to read about Michael J. Fox realizing decades later he’d nailed the Marty role, or when Christopher Lloyd threw out a Back to the Future reference while thanking fans for embracing him on The Mandalorian.
