From less-than-magical remakes to time-travel adventures in a tricked-out DeLorean, here are all of Robert Zemeckis's movies ranked worst to best.
Robert Zemeckis has had a long and varied career as a Hollywood director since the 1970s. As a film student at the University of Southern California, Zemeckis quickly came to the attention of Steven Spielberg, who became his mentor. After a couple of early-career box office disappointments, Zemeckis finally broke through with the action-comedy movie Romancing the Stone before solidifying his legacy with 1985’s Back to the Future.
Throughout his career, Robert Zemeckis has been noted as an important innovator in visual effects. He pioneered motion capture techniques in the 2000s with The Polar Express and Beowulf, which would lay the groundwork for other Hollywood projects to this day (including Avatar 2 with its underwater CGI technology). Before that, Zemeckis was involved in other pioneering visual effects, like motion control cameras and animated composites for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Related: Back to the Future’s Best Change Was To Lower The Budget
Robert Zemeckis is not just an important director for his use of visual effects. He has made some of the most important films of all time and has even won an Academy Award for Best Director. He has also worked across a wide variety of genres, from comedy to science fiction to horror. His career continues to this day, with his live-action remake of Disney’s Pinocchio, starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto (not to be confused with Guillermo Del Toro’s stop-motion animated Pinocchio), due for release in September 2022 on Disney+. Here’s every movie Robert Zemeckis has directed, ranked from worst to best.
Robert Zemeckis’s dramatization of the critically acclaimed documentary Marwencol falls completely flat. Welcome to Marwen reduces the real-life story of artist and photographer Mark Hogancamp's recovery after being the victim of a hate crime into an overly simple "inspirational" drama and fictional love story. The motion capture technology that Zemeckis uses for the war sequences that Hogancamp creates with dolls ultimately comes across as creepy, ruining the uplifting tone the film wishes to achieve. And for a movie so purportedly about women, the female roles in Welcome to Marwen receive little characterization and, in certain cases, even less screen time; for example, Janelle Monáe only has one scene as the veteran who helps Hogancamp recover.
This movie is not only a disappointing remake of Nicolas Roeg's 1990 version of The Witches but also an unsatisfying adaptation of Roald Dahl's original book. Robert Zemeckis replaces Jim Henson's memorable, and surprisingly horrifying, practical effects work and puppetry with unconvincing VFX. Even though Zemeckis's The Witches is far more faithful to Dahl's novel than the 1990 film, his adaptation faced controversy when it was released in 2020. Warner Bros. wound up issuing a formal apology in response to criticisms that the design of the witches reflected real-world disabilities and associated them with evil characters.
Robert Zemeckis was inspired by Alfred Hitchcock when he directed What Lies Beneath in between production blocks of Cast Away. What Lies Beneath takes the themes of paranoia and voyeurism from Rear Window and injects them into a convoluted ghost story. Although the movie begins well with an intriguing plot about a woman who believes that her neighbor may have been murdered by the latter's husband, by the time What Lies Beneath reaches its ending it loses a lot of steam with its barrage of red herrings, twists, and paranormal possessions. However, Michelle Pfeiffer provides a compelling performance as the film's lead character, and Harrison Ford impresses when his character truly comes to life in What Lies Beneath's finale.
Related: Batman: Why Michelle Pfeiffer Is The Best Catwoman
Disney's A Christmas Carol is the most recent wholly-animated motion capture film Robert Zemeckis has directed to date. Jim Carrey is the absolute highlight of the movie; not only does he provide the voice and motion capture for Ebeneezer Scrooge but also for all three Christmas ghosts. Each role gives Carrey the chance to show his range as not only a physical performer but a voice actor as well. Unfortunately, the animation has aged quite poorly since A Christmas Carol's release in 2009, especially compared to another film that utilized similar technology: James Cameron's Avatar.
The visual design of Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol is also quite ugly, and the character models often look like they would fit better in a video game cutscene than in a theatrical film. Still, the changes that Zemeckis makes to A Christmas Carol's story provide for some thrilling sequences in the film, such as the chase with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.
Although Forrest Gump was not only a box-office smash hit but also a critical success when it was released in 1994, and despite winning the Best Picture Oscar over both The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction, there is not a better case of a movie aging poorly. Forrest Gump represents a shift in Robert Zemeckis's career away from comedies to more dramatic fare. However, Forrest Gump shows significant signs of teething problems through its tonal dissonance. The film tries to play like a historical satire, with Tom Hanks's performance as Forrest Gump interacting with various important political and cultural figures of the mid-20th century, but Forrest Gump does not say much about them. No scene exemplifies this more than Forrest's speech on the Vietnam War in Washington D.C., when his microphone cuts out before the audience has the chance to hear what he has to say, as a veteran of the war.
Gump has little autonomy as a central character; instead, he consistently follows orders from other people and finds nothing but personal success from this. However, Forrest Gump does boast groundbreaking visual effects innovations, even if they are more subtle than those of Zemeckis's earlier Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The visual effects that insert Hanks into archival footage and remove Gary Sinise's legs as Lieutenant Dan were incredibly impressive at the time. Unsurprisingly, Forrest Gump also won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and its effects still hold up to this day.
Related: Forrest Gump Hidden Detail Reveals The Dark Secret Of His Ending
Beowulf, Robert Zemeckis's sophomore effort in the world of motion-capture animation, is an impressive technical feat. This is especially true regarding the character model of Grendel's Mother that looks almost exactly like her actress, Angelina Jolie, in real-life. Beowulf is probably the least Zemeckis film that Zemeckis ever made, with its incredibly dark tone and brutal violence; it truly pushes the PG-13 rating to its limit when it comes to levels of bloodshed. Zemeckis was also able to amass an impressive cast for Beowulf, featuring Jolie, Ray Winstone, John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, and Robin Wright. The script was also written by The Sandman comics' Neil Gaiman and provides an exciting blueprint for an underrated movie.
The Polar Express may be the oldest of Robert Zemeckis's motion-capture animated movies, but it is also still the best. Not only is it worth watching for its groundbreaking animation but also for the rip-roaring ride The Polar Express takes the audience on. Robert Zemeckis makes the best use of the CGI world by allowing the camera to fly anywhere. This is most explicit in the exciting high-speed Glacier Gultch scene and the shot of the ticket making its way back to the Polar Express. While the animation is dated, with the characters often looking more like dolls than people, The Polar Express is able to overcome this through the power of Tom Hanks's charm in the many roles he has throughout the film.
Death Becomes Her, starring Bruce Willis, Meryl Streep, and Goldie Hawn is another Robert Zemeckis visual effects masterwork. Instead of using CGI to create entirely animated worlds or to place characters inside archival footage, Zemeckis makes use of VFX to depict body horror to a darkly hilarious degree. Necks twist round, heads fall off bodies, and holes are put through torsos in this twisted comedy about the search for eternal youth. Also, Isabella Rossellini turns up in one of the most gorgeous costumes ever designed for a feature film.
Allied is another outlier in Robert Zemeckis's filmography. It is an explicit throwback to old-school World War II thrillers, complete with spies, bombings, and Nazi assassinations. Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play their roles much like 1940s film stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall would have. At times, Allied feels more like a remake of Casablanca than a Zemeckis movie, with much of the action taking place in the Moroccan city. However, Robert Zemeckis puts his love of VFX to use in Allied's infamous sex scene as a sandstorm envelopes the car of the two leads. While it is nowhere near the level of the aforementioned classic, Allied does effectively capture the atmosphere of an old-school Hollywood war film.
Related: Brad Pitt's Most Exciting 2022 Movie Repeats OUATIH's Genius Trick
The romantic-comedy action movie Romancing the Stone was Robert Zemeckis's breakthrough in Hollywood. After amassing a reputation for films that read well on paper (Zemeckis co-wrote his first two directorial features) but did not translate to financial success, Romancing the Stone was the hit Zemeckis needed in order to make the classics he would go on to create. It would also leave a legacy of romantic adventure movies, with many films (such as the loving Romancing the Stone copy The Lost City) taking their cue from it. This is not to say that the importance of Romancing the Stone lies solely within its commercial success; the film is also a delight in its own right. Stars Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner have absolutely electric chemistry, alongside a hilarious turn from Danny DeVito. Although Romancing the Stone is often seen as a ripoff of Raiders of the Lost Ark, its script actually pre-dates the Indiana Jones movie and chooses a far more comedic tone.
After the massive critical and commercial success of Back to the Future in 1985, a sequel was inevitable. Unfortunately, Back to the Future Part II critically misses the razor-sharp focus that made the first Back to the Future so perfect. Instead of the simple, singular goal of trying to get back to 1985, Marty McFly spends much of Back to the Future Part II's runtime in a madcap rush trying to undo the mistake of attempting to use Doc Brown's time machine for profit. However, for what Back to the Future Part II loses in the story department, it almost makes up for visually. Zemeckis takes the lessons he learned making Who Framed Roger Rabbit and its interactions between cartoon characters and live-action actors and applies them wholly to live-action.
Visual highlights of Back to the Future Part II include the shot of the McFly family, mostly played by multiple Michael J. Foxes, alongside Lea Thompson — but controversially not really Crispin Glover as George McFly — sitting down and eating dinner together. This single shot required multiple takes of each of Michael J. Fox's characters interacting with other objects on set and the invention of motion-controlled camera dollies that could be programmed to repeat their exact movements to complete the creation of the shot.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is not only an impressive directorial debut but a delightful comedy in its own right. The movie also represents a number of firsts for Robert Zemeckis's career: it is the first he co-wrote with Bob Gale as well as his first to be produced by iconic movie director Steven Spielberg. These two collaborators would become instrumental in Zemeckis's career as it went on. The charm of this comedy, about a group of teenagers who would do anything to see The Beatles' landmark live performance on the Ed Sullivan show, proves that Zemeckis has always been a great director, even without the VFX tools that would exemplify the rest of his career.
Related: Steven Spielberg Just Broke His Own Incredible Oscars Record
Zemeckis balances the stories of his six central characters perfectly throughout I Wanna Hold Your Hand, a challenge for any director, let alone a first-timer. He also debuts his future use of visual trickery to have characters interact with real-life figures. Instead of the high-tech CGI used for the true-story elements of Forrest Gump to make real people like George Wallace and John F. Kennedy interact with his fictional characters, Zemeckis relies on archival footage, body doubles, and wide shots to depict The Beatles in I Wanna Hold Your Hand.
Back to the Future Part III is a completely different experience from the first two, mostly due to the fact that it is largely a Western comedy, in a similar vein to Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles. However, this change in both genre and setting provides a focus that was missing from Back to the Future Part II. Marty McFly has a similar goal to the first film by changing the past, this time trying to stop Doc Brown from getting shot in the back by Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen. The addition of Mary Steenburgen to the cast as Doc Brown's love interest, the schoolteacher Clara Clayton, adds a humorous dynamic to Marty and Doc's partnership that was also missing from Back to the Future Part II due to Jennifer's early sidelining.
Although the Western setting means that many of Back to the Future Part II's groundbreaking visual effects are gone, the third part of the trilogy makes up for their absence with its great action sequences. The train set piece at the climax of Back to the Future Part III is thrilling and even contains early instances of CG wire removal on the DeLorean when it is forced into a wheelie as well as digital bluescreen work when Clara almost falls off the train. Back to the Future Part III might not be the best movie in the Back to the Future trilogy but it is a return to form for Robert Zemeckis's most successful film series.
Robert Zemeckis's first adaptation of a successful documentary and real-life story may be somewhat lessened by lead actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt's unconvincing French accent, but it also contains one of the greatest sequences Zemeckis has ever constructed. Once Philippe Petit (Gordon-Levitt) steps off of the roof of the South Tower of the World Trade Center and begins his high-wire walk across to the North Tower, The Walk becomes truly magical. This sequence brings a sense of both wonder and danger to the act that only Zemeckis could achieve. This is not to say that the rest of The Walk is to be looked over. Its structure and style borrow heavily from heist movies as Petit puts together a team of fun characters, the highlight being Charlotte Le Bon as The Walk's Annie Allix, to achieve his goal. The movie moves along at a cracking pace and concludes with some of Robert Zemeckis's best work;
Related: The Best Story For Knives Out 3 (With Joseph Gordon-Levitt)
Cast Away is not only ambitious when it comes to its largely wordless and music-scoreless storytelling, but also to its production. Cast Away was filmed in two separate blocks, in order to accommodate Tom Hanks losing a significant amount of weight and growing his hair out. This was in order to make it look like Tom Hanks's character, Chuck, had been trapped on an island for four years with only a few product-placement FedEx packages for company. Hanks also has the unusually difficult task of spending most of Cast Away's runtime on his own as the only actor onscreen. This challenge is aided somewhat by the instantly iconic Wilson — a volleyball with a bloody hand print for a face — whom Hanks makes one-sided conversation with. Hanks is more than capable of carrying the movie with his powerful performance, and Cast Away's unusual production allowed Robert Zemeckis to direct What Lies Beneath between filming blocks.
Used Cars is the most underrated gem in Robert Zemeckis's entire filmography. The movie was made at a tumultuous time in Zemeckis's career. I Wanna Hold Your Hand did not perform well commercially, despite great reviews from critics, and Steven Spielberg's first feature-length war movie, 1941, which Gale and Zemeckis scripted, had also just bombed. Fortunately, Used Cars was able to revive Zemeckis's career, at least critically, with its pitch-perfect dark comedy and brilliant lead performance from Kurt Russell as a sleazy car salesman with dreams of becoming a state senator.
For Used Cars' finale, Zemeckis staged a thrilling and oftentimes hilarious car chase that easily rivals any scene from The Blues Brothers or Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. No other movie shows Russell surfing on the hood of a car driven by a nervous student driver. Used Cars had the misfortune of being released only a week after the hugely popular, joke-filled movie Airplane! and therefore flopped at the box office.
Flight, Robert Zemeckis's long-awaited return to live-action filmmaking after a 12-year absence, does not disappoint. Denzel Washington delivers one of the best and most heart-wrenching performances of his career as an alcoholic pilot who saves almost every life on his plane after a mechanical failure dooms it to a crash landing. The plane crash sequence that opens Flight is easily the scariest of Robert Zemeckis's career, depicting the plane flying upside down before gliding through a church and crashing to the ground. The human drama that follows is no less harrowing as Zemeckis deals with the awful consequences of alcoholism. Only John Goodman's entertaining performance in the movie as a drug dealer provides some much-needed levity.
Related: Denzel Washington Was Right To Turn Down Terminator 2 Role
Contact fulfills the promise of a Robert Zemeckis drama that his adaptation of Forrest Gump failed at. The movie contains some of the most ambitious and mature filmmaking that Zemeckis has ever attempted. The incredible opening shot that starts out near Earth before pulling out further into the universe, alongside radio transmissions that subtly get older as the shot continues, illustrates the themes of the entire film in one moment. Contact takes a similar approach to first contact with aliens as 2016's Arrival in that it eschews the violent invasion scenario that so many science fiction movies exploit in favor of a story that focuses on communication and understanding. At its heart, Contact is a movie about science, faith, and where they intertwine. Robert Zemeckis deals well with these powerful themes and delivers one of his best directorial achievements.
Although Back to the Future was a technical achievement, especially for its effects showing how the iconic (and heroic) DeLorean time machine travels, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the first movie that truly shows how important Robert Zemeckis is as a VFX pioneer. Who Framed Roger Rabbit's incorporation of cartoon characters into live-action footage is not only an incredible visual effect that still holds up decades later, but it changed the way movies are made. The techniques Zemeckis pioneered, including the use of mannequins to help with the actors' interactions, and the advent of motion control cameras, are still used in Hollywood today.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is not only worth watching for its technical achievements but also for its fantastic noir-inspired tone and story as well as its iconic characters. Jessica Rabbit, Eddie Valentine, and the titular Roger Rabbit are all household names for a reason and easily hold their own in the subtly adult Disney movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit alongside appearances from legendary characters like Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse.
What other movie could top the list except for Back to the Future? The sci-fi comedy displays some of Robert Zemeckis's biggest strengths as a director in the opening shot alone. The camera glides through Doc Brown's lab and visually sets up the entire rest of the movie with news reports on plutonium thefts, newspaper clippings on the history of Hill Valley, and various scientific accouterments Doc Brown has collected over the years to build his time machine. Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd have incredible chemistry as Marty McFly and Doc Brown (it is incredibly difficult to see anyone else in their roles, even though Eric Stoltz was initially cast as Marty and even filmed scenes for six weeks before being fired from the production). The movie has so many iconic scenes that it would be almost impossible to list them all here. Back to the Future ensures Robert Zemeckis's legacy as not only a VFX pioneer but also an incredible director with a mastery over comedy.
Jack Carter is a new Movie/TV Features Writer for Screen Rant, based in the UK. He has been obsessed with filmmaking all his life, from making short films with his friends in his back garden to obtaining a Film and Television Production degree from the University of York. His favorite films include The Matrix (yes, even the sequels), Star Wars, Point Break, The Silence of the Lambs, and anything with David Lynch's name attached, though he will be the first to admit that he'll watch anything and everything. When not writing, you will probably find him hanging out on the beach with his dog or at the movies, popcorn in one hand, Letterboxd in the other. He also posts the occasional rant about movies on Twitter @Jakarta2354 to anyone who will read them. One of these days he may even finish the screenplay he's been threatening to write for so long.