Michael J. Fox: 10 films across a remarkable career

This is a researched feature, separate from Nick Atwal’s personal film reviews.

Before he was Marty McFly, Michael J. Fox was a kid in Burnaby. Born in Edmonton on 9 June 1961 to a father in the Canadian Forces, he moved often until the family settled in Burnaby in the early 1970s, after his father retired. As a teenager, Fox was acting on Leo and Me, a CBC comedy produced in Vancouver. In 1979 he left for Hollywood. Family Ties made him famous on television. Back to the Future made him a film star.

Ten of his films follow, each read four ways: the film, Vancouver’s screen industry that year, Hollywood at the time, and Fox’s own life. The order isn’t a ranking, and it isn’t Fox’s. Where a film never came near British Columbia, its Vancouver section says so. Personal history sticks to the record.

1. Back to the Future (1985)

   1985 · Directed by Robert Zemeckis · Marty McFly

   Robert Zemeckis and his writing partner Bob Gale built the film around Marty McFly, a 17-year-old accidentally sent thirty years into the past in a time machine built by his friend, the scientist Doc Brown. Amblin Entertainment produced it, with Steven Spielberg among the executive producers, and Universal released it on 3 July 1985. It was the year’s highest-grossing film worldwide, won the Academy Award for sound effects editing and, in 2007, joined the National Film Registry.

   Fox wasn’t the first Marty. The American Film Institute’s catalog records that Eric Stoltz was replaced after about five weeks of filming and his footage scrapped. Zemeckis said it wasn’t Stoltz’s talent but a performance out of step with his vision for the film. The scenes were reshot with Fox, who has said he knew he was stepping into a role another actor had already played on camera.

   Vancouver in 1985

   Back home, the region was getting ready for a world’s fair, first branded Transpo 86 and then Expo 86, with a rapid-transit line as its centrepiece. SkyTrain construction began on 1 March 1982, a one-kilometre demonstration section along Terminal Avenue was finished in 1983, and the line opened to the public on 11 December 1985, running to New Westminster. Paid service began in January 1986.

   Fox had already been home on camera. In October 1983, CBC’s Vancouver Life interviewed the young Family Ties star in the studio where he’d started out on Leo and Me. He talked about trying his luck in Hollywood and getting used to working beside actors he’d once watched on television.

   Amblin and Universal in 1985

   Amblin had two films out that summer: The Goonies in June, then Zemeckis’s film about a month later. Selecting it for the registry, the Library of Congress framed it as Zemeckis exploring “the possibilities of special effects” long before Beowulf or The Polar Express.

   Fox in 1985

   Fox turned 24 that June, and the film had to fit around Family Ties. In Future Boy, his book about this period, he describes shooting the sitcom by day and Back to the Future well into the evening through the late winter and early spring of 1985, so he wouldn’t miss a day of it. Two jobs, one 24-year-old, no time machine.

   It was also the year he met Tracy Pollan. In Still, he recalls that they met in 1985, working together on Family Ties. They married in 1988.

   Why it matters

   One summer turned a Burnaby-raised TV actor into a film star, while his home region built a transit line to show itself off to the world. Both were selling the future. Everything after it on this list gets measured against Marty McFly.

2. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

   1989 · Directed by Robert Zemeckis · Marty McFly, Marty Jr. and Marlene

   The first sequel reunited Zemeckis, Gale and Fox and was released on 22 November 1989. It jumps between timelines, and Fox plays Marty, the future Marty Jr. and Marlene. For the family dinner scene, the production used a camera rig that could repeat its moves. Fox played the older Marty first, then changed into Marty Jr. or Marlene make-up while the rig replayed the moves and fed him his earlier lines through an earpiece. He was, quite literally, talking to himself.

   It ends on a “To Be Concluded” card and a preview of Part III. The AFI catalog records that the sequels were filmed back to back to make the most of Fox’s time away from Family Ties. Production began in early 1989.

   Vancouver in 1989

   SkyTrain reached Columbia station in 1989, and the region gained a second studio lot. Stephen J. Cannell’s series Stingray had moved from Calgary to Vancouver because of the weather, so his company bought land and built a studio. North Shore Studios’ own history says ground was broken in North Vancouver in 1988, 21 Jump Street, Wiseguy and Stingray began filming there in June 1989 before construction was finished, and grand-opening parties followed that September.

   Sequels shot back to back

   Shooting two sequels as one production was a logistical bet organized around a TV star’s calendar. It also leaned on motion-control photography, which let a camera repeat a move exactly, to put Fox in the frame with himself.

   Fox in 1989

   Family Ties ended in 1989, a year after he married Tracy Pollan. Part II was his second release that year. Three months earlier came Casualties of War, a drama about as far from Marty McFly as he could go.

   Why it matters

   Part II shows how much of the trilogy was built around Fox: a two-film shoot scheduled around a sitcom, and effects designed so he could fill a scene alone. Everything bent to his schedule, and the show that set it ended that same year.

3. Back to the Future Part III (1990)

   1990 · Directed by Robert Zemeckis · Marty McFly and Seamus McFly

   The third film sends Marty to 1885 and turns the trilogy into a Western. Fox plays Marty and his Irish ancestor Seamus McFly, with Lea Thompson as Seamus’s wife, Maggie. Universal released it on 25 May 1990, about six months after Part II, and Box Office Mojo lists a worldwide gross of about $245 million.

   The Old West was found in real places. A drive-in set went up in Monument Valley, near the Utah–Arizona border, for the scene where Doc sends Marty back in time. Many frontier scenes were shot at Railtown 1897 State Historic Park in Jamestown, California, with the historic Sierra No. 3 locomotive, which still runs excursions there.

   Vancouver in 1990

   In 1990 SkyTrain crossed the Fraser River on the new SkyBridge to reach Scott Road station, extending the line built as Expo 86’s legacy project. Part III itself has no British Columbia connection.

   A week before it opened, a Hollywood comedy made largely in B.C. reached cinemas: Bird on a Wire, with Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn, on 18 May 1990. The AFI catalog records that principal photography was scheduled to begin in Vancouver on 15 April 1989 and that the finale’s zoo set was built at the Bridge Studios in Burnaby; production notes called it the largest studio set ever built in Vancouver. The credits thank the British Columbia Film Commission, and the motorcycle chase was filmed in Fan Tan Alley in Victoria’s Chinatown.

   Hollywood in 1990

   Part III borrowed from Hollywood’s own Westerns: the Hill Valley station where Marty arrives was first built for Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985). Hollywood never throws out a good train station. The 1885 town set at Red Hills Ranch in California kept working for other productions until a wildfire destroyed it in 1996.

   Fox in 1990

   Later in 1990 Fox went to Florida to start his next picture, Doc Hollywood. That shoot would change his life.

   Why it matters

   The time-travel trilogy ends further back than it ever went, in the Old West, with Fox playing his own ancestor. It also closes a chapter: the years when his film career had to be squeezed around a weekly series.

4. Teen Wolf (1985)

   1985 · Directed by Rod Daniel · Scott Howard

   Teen Wolf, written by Jeph Loeb and Matthew Weisman and directed by Rod Daniel, casts Fox as Scott Howard, a high-school student who finds out he’s a werewolf. It was shot in November and December 1984, during a break from Family Ties and months before Fox joined Back to the Future. Atlantic Releasing put it in cinemas on 23 August 1985, to mixed reviews.

   The timing made it part of Back to the Future’s summer. Teen Wolf opened at No. 2, behind Back to the Future, so Fox starred in the top two films that weekend. Some foreign distributors leaned all the way in: in Italy Scott was renamed Marty, and in Brazil the film was released as O Garoto do Futuro. Subtle, it was not.

   Vancouver in 1985

   While Fox was becoming a film star in Los Angeles, British Columbia was becoming somewhere Hollywood came to work. Mike Gasher’s history of the province’s feature industry, Hollywood North, points to the low Canadian dollar and B.C.’s proximity to Los Angeles as central to that growth. The AFI catalog records that The Boy Who Could Fly was set to begin principal photography in Vancouver in May 1985, on a thirteen-week schedule.

   The buildings hadn’t caught up. Since the mid-1970s, crews in Burnaby had worked on a temporary basis in unused parts of the former Dominion Bridge steel plant, which wouldn’t be renovated into a permanent studio until 1987. The same year brought Sandy Wilson’s My American Cousin, which the Georgia Straight later credited with having “almost single-handedly made it okay for Canada to play Canada.”

   Hollywood in 1985

   Teen Wolf came from Atlantic Releasing, not Universal, yet its fortunes were shaped by Universal’s film, still No. 1 when Teen Wolf arrived seven weeks later.

   Fox in 1985

   Teen Wolf shows how Fox worked in 1985, in the gaps of a TV schedule, as reporting on his memoir confirms. He has called it “not my magnum opus.” Fair.

   Why it matters

   Made separately, the two films landed in the same summer and set Fox’s screen image as a quick, likeable everyman. Fox was making movies in the gaps of a sitcom. B.C. was making them in the corners of an old steel plant.

5. The Secret of My Success (1987)

   1987 · Directed by Herbert Ross · Brantley Foster

   Herbert Ross produced and directed this Universal comedy, released on 10 April 1987. Fox plays Brantley Foster, a Kansas native who moves to Manhattan for a finance job, finds the position eliminated, and ends up at his uncle’s company, posing as an executive. Helen Slater co-stars.

   Critics were mixed. Audiences kept coming: The Numbers’ weekend chart has it at No. 1 for five straight weekends, from 10 April to 8 May 1987.

   Vancouver in 1987

   In 1987 the Burnaby Fox grew up in finally got a permanent film studio. After lobbying by local film unions, guilds and suppliers, the provincial government agreed to invest in renovating the old Dominion Bridge plant. Several plant buildings were reused, the facility became the Bridge Studios, and MacGyver was among its first productions. That December The Christian Science Monitor ran the headline “Ta-ta Hollywood, hello Vancouver,” describing MacGyver as one of the shows “finding Canada cheaper, more scenic.”

   The money was growing too. Cinema Canada reported the B.C. Motion Picture Association’s 1987 tally at $282.9 million in production, $152.2 million of which stayed in the province, and the industry celebrated a record year at its year-end party.

   Hollywood in 1987

   A Hollywood Reporter year-end tally, reported by UPI, ranked The Secret of My Success sixth among 1987 releases at about $67 million, in a year UPI’s headline gave to Eddie Murphy as the hottest star on film. Ross’s film sat right in that mainstream: a studio comedy built on a star persona TV had already made familiar.

   Fox in 1987

   Television was still the anchor. In 1987 Fox won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for Family Ties, the second of three straight, from 1986 to 1988. Brantley Foster, a young man in a hurry to get ahead in business, reads like Alex P. Keaton’s big-screen cousin. Same hurry, bigger office.

   Why it matters

   If one year shows the parallel this list keeps drawing, it’s 1987: Fox leading a hit studio comedy and a hit sitcom at once, while the suburb he grew up in became part of the machinery bringing American TV production north. He’d gone south to find the work. Now the work was heading the other way.

6. Casualties of War (1989)

   1989 · Directed by Brian De Palma · PFC Max Eriksson

   Brian De Palma’s Vietnam War drama, written by David Rabe, is based on Daniel Lang’s New Yorker article of 18 October 1969 about a 1966 crime in which four American soldiers abducted, raped and murdered a young Vietnamese woman. Fox plays Eriksson, the name Lang gave the soldier who came forward: a newcomer who refuses to take part, tries to help the woman, then tries to report the crime and is pressured by his superiors to drop it. Sean Penn plays the squad leader, Sgt. Tony Meserve.

   Columbia released it on 18 August 1989, and it opened fourth at the box office. Roger Ebert wrote that more than most films it depended on the strength of its performances. The AFI catalog notes that the end credits thank the crew in Thailand and the people of Phuket, Phang-Nga and Kanchanaburi.

   Vancouver in 1989

   Casualties of War has no British Columbia connection, and that contrast is the point. That summer 21 Jump Street, Wiseguy and Stingray were filming at Cannell’s new North Shore Studios, while a performer who’d started as a teenager on a CBC series in Vancouver was co-starring in a serious American war drama.

   Hollywood and the story, 1969 to 1989

   The film took twenty years to arrive. When Lang’s article became a McGraw-Hill book in 1969, studios went after the screen rights. De Palma said he tried to option it in 1970 but couldn’t, having made only a few theatrical features. A German adaptation, Michael Verhoeven’s o.k., appeared in 1970. De Palma finally made it as his first film after The Untouchables.

   Fox in 1989

   Released the year Family Ties ended, it asked Fox to carry the film’s conscience opposite Penn, with none of the comedy audiences expected: no quick timing to lean on, just a newcomer who won’t look away. The extended home-video edition includes a conversation with Fox about the character, titled “Eriksson’s War.”

   Why it matters

   Same year, two very different Foxes: in August the conscience of a war film, by November Marty McFly again. It’s the strongest case on this list for his range beyond comedy, and it put a Canadian actor at the centre of an American reckoning with the Vietnam War.

7. Doc Hollywood (1991)

   1991 · Directed by Michael Caton-Jones · Dr. Benjamin Stone

   Fox plays Dr. Benjamin Stone, a young doctor whose car trouble strands him in the small town of Grady, South Carolina; Julie Warner co-stars. Michael Caton-Jones directed the romantic comedy for Warner Bros., which released it nationwide on 2 August 1991. Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four: the trailer had led him to expect a comedy, he wrote, but he found a good romance too, “a sweetheart of a movie.”

   South Carolina was played by Florida. The AFI catalog records that principal photography began in Gainesville on 7 November 1990, that Micanopy and McIntosh, small towns south of Gainesville, became Grady, and that The Hollywood Reporter described a $12 million “transformation” of the Florida locations. After six weeks in Florida the production spent three in Los Angeles, with exteriors in Hollywood and Beverly Hills and interiors at Warner Bros. Studios.

   Vancouver in 1991

   Doc Hollywood has no British Columbia connection, but it runs on the trick the province was building an industry on: one place made up to play another. By 1991 Vancouver could offer that flexibility from two permanent studios: the Bridge Studios in Burnaby, opened in 1987, and North Shore Studios in North Vancouver, completed in 1989.

   Hollywood in 1991

   Warner Bros. opened it on 1,575 screens. According to The Numbers, it debuted at No. 3 with about $7.25 million. Three weeks in, The Hollywood Reporter put its gross at $26.3 million, a figure preserved in the AFI catalog’s production history.

   Fox in 1991

   This is the film during which Fox’s life changed. According to The Michael J. Fox Foundation, he developed a tremor in his little finger while filming Doc Hollywood, and a neurologist then diagnosed young-onset Parkinson’s disease. He was 29. Still opens there, on a morning in a Florida hotel when he noticed the tremor.

   He kept the diagnosis private for seven years and disclosed it publicly in 1998.

   Why it matters

   It’s hard to watch it the same way now. A light comedy about a doctor forced to slow down turned out to be the film Fox was making when his own health changed. Every scripted film after it on this list came out while he was living privately with Parkinson’s, carrying something audiences couldn’t see.

8. The Frighteners (1996)

   1996 · Directed by Peter Jackson · Frank Bannister

   Fox plays Frank Bannister, who gains the ability to contact the dead after a car crash and whom most of the town of Fairwater takes for a con man. Robert Zemeckis hired Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh to write it, at first planning to direct it himself as a spin-off of the TV series Tales from the Crypt. Then he decided Jackson should direct, with Zemeckis producing and Universal financing and distributing.

   The box office shrugged, but the film hung on to an audience, and anniversary pieces have revisited it as a cult favourite.

   Vancouver in 1996

   The X-Files was still being made in Vancouver, where it stayed for its first five seasons before production moved to Los Angeles. At home, the competition was sharpening. In May 1996 Playback reported a warning from Wayne Sterloff, then president of BC Film, that Ontario’s new 15 per cent tax credit could cost B.C.’s economy $60 million to $90 million in its first year.

   The Frighteners shows the competition from further away. It’s set in the American Midwest and was made entirely in New Zealand, around Wellington and at Lyttelton near Christchurch. Accounts differ on how Universal felt; one says the studio agreed as long as Jackson could find places around Wellington that looked like the Midwest. Apparently he could. It was Vancouver’s pitch to Hollywood, made from the other side of the Pacific.

   Hollywood in 1996

   It opened on the weekend of 19 July 1996 at No. 5, with about $5.57 million from 1,669 theatres, according to The Numbers’ weekend chart. Independence Day, in its third weekend, was No. 1; The Nutty Professor was fourth. Framerated’s retrospective argues the film was hurt by Independence Day and held back by its R rating.

   The effects came from Weta, which Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk had formed in 1993 to work on Heavenly Creatures. The film needed more digital effects work than many before it, and post-production ran about 18 months. Jackson credited Zemeckis with shielding the production from interference during a gruelling 26-week shoot.

   Fox in 1996

   The Frighteners came out five years after Fox’s diagnosis, and the public still didn’t know. According to his foundation, during the third season of the sitcom Spin City he realized he could no longer hide his Parkinson’s. After one more season, he retired from full-time acting to focus on advocacy and fundraising.

   Why it matters

   A lead performance in a demanding effects film, made in a country learning to double for America, by an actor carrying a diagnosis he hadn’t yet shared. It was also the film on which Weta, then three years old, learned much of its trade. Not a hit. Still a beginning.

9. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993)

   1993 · Directed by Duwayne Dunham · Voice of Chance

   Disney’s remake of its own 1963 film The Incredible Journey comes from the novel by Sheila Burnford, a Scottish-born writer who settled in Port Arthur, Ontario, now Thunder Bay, and set the book in northwestern Ontario. The 1993 film moves the story to California: three pets left behind when their family moves to San Francisco set out through the Sierra Nevada to find them. Fox voices Chance; Sally Field voices Sassy, a Himalayan cat; and Don Ameche voices Shadow, an ageing golden retriever.

   It was the feature directing debut of Duwayne Dunham, an editor known for work including David Lynch productions and an Emmy winner for Twin Peaks.

   Vancouver in 1993

   The year Homeward Bound opened, The X-Files began airing on Fox, made in Vancouver for its first five seasons. In December 1993 Playback reported that the B.C. Film Commission had counted 73 productions in the province that year, ten more than the year before.

   Homeward Bound itself went south. The AFI catalog records that it was shot in Oregon from August through October 1991, with parts of downtown Portland standing in for San Francisco, eastern Oregon for Bishop, California, and the Eagle Cap Wilderness for the Sierra Nevada. Crews packed cameras and equipment onto mules and horses and rode more than 15 miles into protected wilderness. A film about pets finding their way home needed mules just to find the set. Location manager Mark C. Hughes said Oregon was popular with filmmakers “because of its varied topography.”

   Hollywood in 1993

   Disney went back to its own shelf, returning to a story it had filmed thirty years earlier and releasing it under its Buena Vista label. D23, Disney’s official fan club, dates its initial release to 3 February 1993 and its general release to 12 February. According to The Numbers, the wide-release weekend of 12 to 15 February brought in about $8.1 million from 1,702 theatres, third for the weekend, on the way to a domestic gross of about $41.8 million.

   Fox in 1993

   It was shot in late 1991, the year Fox was diagnosed, and released in 1993, five years before he made his condition public. It’s the one entry on this list where he’s heard and never seen.

   Why it matters

   You never see him, and you’d still know him anywhere: Fox gives Chance the same restless comic energy as his on-screen roles. Around him the map gets shuffled, an Ontario story moved to California and filmed in Oregon, the kind of Pacific Northwest location work Vancouver was chasing too. Places can be swapped. That voice can’t.

10. Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie (2023)

    2023 · Directed by Davis Guggenheim · Himself

    Davis Guggenheim’s documentary tells Fox’s story largely in his own words; he’s the only person interviewed on camera. The narration draws on recordings of Fox reading his memoirs, and Guggenheim and editor Michael Harte recut clips from his films and TV work, home movies, behind-the-scenes footage and talk-show appearances to fit it. Still premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2023 and reached Apple TV+ and select theatres on 12 May 2023.

    It won four Emmys at the Creative Arts ceremony in January 2024: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special, directing for Guggenheim, picture editing for Harte and music composition for John Powell. RogerEbert.com’s review noted that the comic timing that made Fox a star increasingly eludes him as Parkinson’s takes its toll, and credited the film with keeping him in front of the camera, speaking straight to viewers.

    Vancouver in the film

    Still brings the story back to where it started. Many moments in Fox’s life had no archive footage, so the production staged recreations, and as TheWrap reported in its interview with Guggenheim, they were shot in Vancouver. Guggenheim storyboarded each one, and Harte laid footage from Fox’s films and series over the boards.

    The recreated flashbacks cover the years before fame, including his decision to leave high school for Hollywood as a teenager, and the film recounts his first professional role, on the CBC sitcom Leo and Me. The Boston Globe’s review noted that Fox links his restlessness partly to having to outrun bullies as a small kid in Canada.

    Sundance, Hot Docs and streaming

    Still went from Sundance to Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in the spring of 2023, and it was later nominated for a Peabody Award.

    Fox in 2023

    By the time of Still, Fox had lived with Parkinson’s for more than three decades. His foundation records that he disclosed his diagnosis in 1998, testified before the US Congress in 1999 for greater federal investment in research, and launched The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research in 2000. By 2004 he was back in supporting roles, on one condition: that his symptoms could be written into the characters.

    The honours kept coming. He was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2000. The Governor General’s honours record lists his appointment as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010 (invested in 2011) and his promotion to Companion, the order’s highest level, in 2026. He was invested as a Companion at Rideau Hall on 2 October 2026, when it cited his global advocacy and his honesty about Parkinson’s.

    Why it matters

    Still closes the circle. A teenager left the Lower Mainland to chase Hollywood, and decades later a crew came back to Vancouver to restage the life he had before it. The diagnosis reshaped his career and his public life. It never took the story out of his hands.

What the ten films add up to

In order, the list runs from the double shifts of 1985 through the back-to-back sequels and the hard turn of Casualties of War to Doc Hollywood, where he first noticed the symptom that led to his diagnosis. Homeward Bound and The Frighteners came out while that diagnosis was private. Still, made after decades of public advocacy, goes back over all of it.

Over the same years, British Columbia’s screen business changed beyond recognition. Mike Gasher’s history Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia notes that before the mid-1970s the province had little production that could properly be called an industry. When the British Columbia Film Commission marked its 20th anniversary in 1998, Playback reported that production spending in the province had grown from $17.5 million in the late 1970s to more than $630 million in 1997.

Fox built his film career in the United States, not in that story. But he started in a CBC studio in Vancouver, grew up in the Burnaby that later housed the Bridge Studios, and in the last film on this list a crew came back to Vancouver to recreate the life that began there. He had to leave to become a movie star. Decades later, the movies came back to where he started.

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