Back To The Future Day

2010eventclassic

Back to the Future Day is the internet event tied to October 21, 2015, the future date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II. Between 2010 and 2012, photoshopped images of the DeLorean's time clock repeatedly tricked fans into thinking the film's date had already arrived.

hoax memesphotoshop memesannual tradition memessci fi movie memesmisinformation memes

Overview

Back to the Future Day refers to October 21, 2015, the exact date Doc Brown and Marty McFly punch into the DeLorean when they jump forward in Back to the Future Part II1. Long before the real date rolled around, the label attached itself to a running online joke where people photoshopped the DeLorean's dashboard time clock to display the current day, then watched fans of the trilogy panic that they had somehow missed the moment2.

The format is simple. Take the movie's famous digital time readout, swap the destination date for today, and post it with a caption about Marty arriving. The gag worked so well that news outlets covered it repeatedly across separate years, treating each new fake image as its own small scandal3. Because the real 2015 date sat almost three decades in the future when the film came out in 1989, there was plenty of runway for the joke to keep looping around online4.

How It Spread

News aggregators including BuzzFeed, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Age picked up the 2010 hoax within days4. Writing at The Guardian, Catherine Shoard called the tampering sacrilege against a film so tightly built around split-second timing1. Total Film owned up on July 6, 2010, publishing a blog post that walked through how they pulled the stunt, and mentioned that a fresh hoax image dated for July 6 was already circulating4.

The joke came back bigger on June 27, 2012, when Steve Berry, social media manager at UK mobile checkout startup Simply Tap, uploaded a fresh photoshopped time clock reading June 27, 2012 to promote a Back to the Future trilogy Blu-ray box set for a client2. Berry told Mashable he built the post on the assumption that no one could possibly fall for the same joke twice, and he deliberately reused the earlier caption word for word so people would catch the reference2. Instead the image kept moving. Reposted to the Facebook page of craft company Colour Me Fun, it picked up more than 10,000 shares plus nearly 1,000 likes, with follow-up coverage from The Telegraph, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME3.

A July 11, 2012 revival version made another lap on Facebook with the same Marty-arrives-in-the-future caption, prompting Snopes to file a debunk4. Each fresh hoax cycle spawned another round of news write-ups, which in turn taught more people about the meme, which fed the next round of doctored images.

How to Use This Meme

The Back to the Future Day template is a photoshopped edit of the DeLorean's dashboard time clock, with the film's real destination readout of October 21, 2015 swapped for whatever date the poster wants people to fall for3. Posts typically pair the doctored screenshot with the standard caption about Marty McFly arriving in the future, matching the phrasing from the 2010 Total Film hoax that started the pattern2. Single-serving joke sites like October212015 and itsbacktothefutureday.com later offered generators and running counters so anyone could produce their own fake without touching Photoshop directly4.

Cultural Impact

The repeat hoaxes turned a niche film reference into recurring international news between 2010 and 2012, with pieces at The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Week, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME all treating each new fake DeLorean clock as its own story13. Steve Berry, the Simply Tap manager behind the 2012 version, later told Mashable his one regret was forgetting to add his client's web address to the image, joking about all the traffic he failed to catch2. The pattern of fans falling for the exact same trick multiple years running made the DeLorean time readout into one of the most reliably remixable movie stills of the early 2010s4.

Frequently Asked Questions

Back To The Future Day

2010eventclassic

Back to the Future Day is the internet event tied to October 21, 2015, the future date Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to in Back to the Future Part II. Between 2010 and 2012, photoshopped images of the DeLorean's time clock repeatedly tricked fans into thinking the film's date had already arrived.

hoax memes photoshop memes annual tradition memes sci fi movie memes misinformation memes

Overview

Back to the Future Day refers to October 21, 2015, the exact date Doc Brown and Marty McFly punch into the DeLorean when they jump forward in Back to the Future Part II1. Long before the real date rolled around, the label attached itself to a running online joke where people photoshopped the DeLorean's dashboard time clock to display the current day, then watched fans of the trilogy panic that they had somehow missed the moment2.

The format is simple. Take the movie's famous digital time readout, swap the destination date for today, and post it with a caption about Marty arriving. The gag worked so well that news outlets covered it repeatedly across separate years, treating each new fake image as its own small scandal3. Because the real 2015 date sat almost three decades in the future when the film came out in 1989, there was plenty of runway for the joke to keep looping around online4.

How It Spread

News aggregators including BuzzFeed, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Age picked up the 2010 hoax within days4. Writing at The Guardian, Catherine Shoard called the tampering sacrilege against a film so tightly built around split-second timing1. Total Film owned up on July 6, 2010, publishing a blog post that walked through how they pulled the stunt, and mentioned that a fresh hoax image dated for July 6 was already circulating4.

The joke came back bigger on June 27, 2012, when Steve Berry, social media manager at UK mobile checkout startup Simply Tap, uploaded a fresh photoshopped time clock reading June 27, 2012 to promote a Back to the Future trilogy Blu-ray box set for a client2. Berry told Mashable he built the post on the assumption that no one could possibly fall for the same joke twice, and he deliberately reused the earlier caption word for word so people would catch the reference2. Instead the image kept moving. Reposted to the Facebook page of craft company Colour Me Fun, it picked up more than 10,000 shares plus nearly 1,000 likes, with follow-up coverage from The Telegraph, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME3.

A July 11, 2012 revival version made another lap on Facebook with the same Marty-arrives-in-the-future caption, prompting Snopes to file a debunk4. Each fresh hoax cycle spawned another round of news write-ups, which in turn taught more people about the meme, which fed the next round of doctored images.

How to Use This Meme

The Back to the Future Day template is a photoshopped edit of the DeLorean's dashboard time clock, with the film's real destination readout of October 21, 2015 swapped for whatever date the poster wants people to fall for3. Posts typically pair the doctored screenshot with the standard caption about Marty McFly arriving in the future, matching the phrasing from the 2010 Total Film hoax that started the pattern2. Single-serving joke sites like October212015 and itsbacktothefutureday.com later offered generators and running counters so anyone could produce their own fake without touching Photoshop directly4.

Cultural Impact

The repeat hoaxes turned a niche film reference into recurring international news between 2010 and 2012, with pieces at The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Week, Slate, Mashable, BuzzFeed, and NME all treating each new fake DeLorean clock as its own story13. Steve Berry, the Simply Tap manager behind the 2012 version, later told Mashable his one regret was forgetting to add his client's web address to the image, joking about all the traffic he failed to catch2. The pattern of fans falling for the exact same trick multiple years running made the DeLorean time readout into one of the most reliably remixable movie stills of the early 2010s4.

Frequently Asked Questions