In a 2013 interview with DGA Quarterly, Zemeckis was asked about his “rocky start” in the film business. Though I take issue with his categorization of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Used Cars” as “absolute failures at the box office” (the former made $1.9 million, while the latter did $12.7 million on an $8 million budget), they were expected to perform much better given Spielberg’s name on the marketing materials.

The disappointment of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” was especially confounding for Zemeckis because it tested spectacularly well. He thought he’d made a hit. The studio, however, let him and the film down.

As Zemeckis told DGA Quarterly:

“The biggest lesson I learned on both of those projects was that a filmmaker’s job isn’t done when you’re finished making the movie. You have to really get involved in the marketing. I still remember the first marketing meeting for ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ where this guy said, ‘So, what do you want us to do?’ I thought, ‘Uh, oh, this is a thing, I have to go home and start thinking of some TV spots.’ I realized then that the studio really wasn’t some big happy family where everybody was watching everybody else’s back. Just because you were making a movie at a studio didn’t mean the studio had any interest in it.”

“Used Cars” was a trickier sell as an acerbic satire of capitalism sandwiched in between the July 1980 release dates of the straightforwardly silly “Airplane!” and “Caddyshack,” but it and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” are now considered early-career triumphs for Zemeckis. And he most certainly applied what he learned from those disappointments to the selling of his movies going forward. As for whether that was a good thing, watch the trailer for Zemeckis’ upcoming “Here” and you tell me.