On Friday, June 25, 1982, Warner Bros. released Blade Runner, the second feature film directed by the British advertising filmmaker Ridley Scott, in 1,290 American theaters. The film placed third at the box office that weekend, behind Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (in its third week of release) and Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (in its fourth). Domestic ticket sales for the opening weekend were approximately six million dollars. The film’s production budget had been thirty million. The critical reception was mixed: Pauline Kael disliked it; Roger Ebert gave it three stars out of four; many reviewers complained about the studio-imposed Harrison Ford voiceover narration that bracketed the film’s noir-influenced visual storytelling.
By the end of its theatrical run in October 1982, Blade Runner had grossed approximately thirty-three million dollars domestically and forty million worldwide. The film was considered a commercial disappointment by Warner Bros., by the production company Ladd Company, and by its director Ridley Scott. Harrison Ford, who had spent four months filming on the rainy Warner Bros. Burbank backlot in 1981, refused to discuss the film publicly for the next twenty-five years. Ridley Scott returned to commercial advertising work for two years before directing Legend (1985).
The film disappeared from commercial cinema circulation in late 1982. And then, in 1992, after a decade of midnight-movie screenings, university film-society retrospectives, and the gradual emergence of the cyberpunk literary genre that had been inspired by it, Warner Bros. released a 116-minute Director’s Cut of Blade Runner that removed the voiceover, restored a unicorn dream sequence Scott had cut from the original, and added an ambiguous ending. The reissue was followed by a 2007 Final Cut. Blade Runner was, by then, no longer a box-office failure. It was canonical. The visual lexicon the film had built (the rainy night-time Los Angeles, the neon Asian signage, the off-world advertising blimps, the giant geisha advertisements, the Spinner flying cars, the Tyrell Corporation pyramid) had become the foundational reference for almost every subsequent depiction of urban futurism for the next forty years.
June 25, 1982
The June 25, 1982 release date had been selected by producer Alan Ladd Jr. on the basis of his previous highest-grossing films, Star Wars (May 25, 1977) and Alien (May 25, 1979), both of which had opened on the same approximate weekend. Ladd, who had founded the Ladd Company after leaving Twentieth Century-Fox, considered late May and June his lucky theatrical-release window. The 1982 calendar produced a different result. Three weeks earlier, on June 4, Paramount had released Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which had recouped its eleven-million-dollar budget in its opening weekend and was on its way to a domestic gross of approximately eighty million. Two weeks earlier, on June 11, Universal had released Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which would go on to gross approximately three hundred and fifty million domestically and become the highest-grossing film of the 1980s. The same Friday Blade Runner opened, John Carpenter’s The Thing also opened. The science-fiction theatrical market in June 1982 was overcrowded.
Blade Runner‘s opening weekend gross was approximately six million dollars, well below industry expectations for a thirty-million-dollar science-fiction film with Harrison Ford in the lead role. The film placed third in its opening weekend and dropped to sixth in its second weekend. The critical reception was mixed. The New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael called the film exhausting. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three stars out of four. Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised the visuals but criticized the narrative. The most consistent complaint, across reviewers, concerned the Harrison Ford voiceover narration that bracketed the film’s scenes and the unsatisfying happy-ending sequence that the studio had added against Scott’s wishes.
By the end of the summer 1982 box office cycle, Blade Runner was widely considered a failure. Warner Bros. quietly cut its print run in late August. The film closed its domestic theatrical run in October 1982 with approximately thirty-three million dollars in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales. Worldwide gross reached approximately forty million dollars. Ridley Scott did not direct another science-fiction film for thirty years.
Philip K. Dick to Hampton Fancher
The source novel was Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, published by Doubleday in 1968 and largely out of print by 1980. Dick, then fifty-one years old and living in Santa Ana, California, had written approximately forty-five novels and one hundred and twenty short stories across his career. He was a major figure in American science fiction but had spent most of his life in financial precarity. Dick had sold the film rights to Do Androids Dream in 1973 for a small sum. The rights had moved through several hands by 1980, when producer Michael Deeley acquired them for the Ladd Company.
The screenplay went through multiple drafts. Hampton Fancher, a former actor turned screenwriter, wrote the initial 1979 draft. The script was rewritten by David Webb Peoples in 1980, who restructured the narrative and added the rooftop confrontation between Deckard and Roy Batty. The final shooting script was a Fancher-Peoples collaboration with extensive revisions from Ridley Scott and from Hampton Fancher’s continuing involvement.
Dick was invited to a special screening of approximately twenty minutes of completed footage at Warner Bros. in late 1981. Dick attended the screening in poor health. He approved enthusiastically of the production design, telling a Los Angeles Times reporter that the Los Angeles 2019 cityscape was exactly what he had been trying to describe in his novel for fourteen years. He had remaining reservations about the screenplay’s interpretation of his philosophical material. He died of a stroke on Tuesday, March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, three months before Blade Runner‘s theatrical release. He was fifty-three. He never saw the completed film.
The film’s relationship to Dick’s novel was loose. The novel’s plot of bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunting six androids in a depopulated post-apocalyptic Earth was largely retained. The novel’s specific philosophical and theological material (the Mercerism religion, the empathy box, the live-animal market, the Penfield mood organ) was almost entirely cut. The four replicants of the film (Roy Batty, Pris, Zhora, Leon) were partly invented for the screenplay. The rooftop monologue Batty delivers at the end of the film was almost entirely Rutger Hauer’s own improvised addition, written by Hauer the night before the scene was filmed.
Ridley Scott and Jordan Cronenweth
Ridley Scott was forty-four when he began principal photography on Blade Runner in March 1981. He had been born on November 30, 1937, in South Shields, a coal-port town in northeast England. His father had been a senior officer in the Royal Engineers; his older brother Tony Scott would become a film director (Top Gun, True Romance) and his younger brother Frank would work as a producer. Scott had studied at the West Hartlepool College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He had spent the 1960s and 1970s directing television commercials for the British advertising industry (his Hovis bread commercial of 1973, set in the Yorkshire moors, was one of the most-praised British advertisements of the decade). His first feature film, The Duellists (1977), had won the Best First Feature prize at Cannes. His second feature, Alien (1979), had grossed approximately seventy-eight million dollars on a budget of eleven million and established Scott as a major director.
Scott’s cinematographer for Blade Runner was Jordan Cronenweth, an American director of photography then forty-seven years old. Cronenweth had been born on February 14, 1935, in Los Angeles, and had spent the 1970s shooting independent and studio films including Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980). He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1979 but continued to work. Cronenweth’s contribution to Blade Runner was the film’s signature lighting: low-key, high-contrast, with shafts of practical light from off-screen sources (smoke, mist, blade-shaped reflections from blinds) used to define the noir geometry of every interior.
The rest of the production team was unusually deep. Production designer Lawrence G. Paull built the urban architecture. Visual futurist Syd Mead, the American industrial designer who had previously designed concept vehicles for Ford and U.S. Steel and the original Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, designed the Spinner flying cars and many of the urban architectural details. Special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, who had previously worked on Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, handled the model and miniature work. Wardrobe was designed by Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan. The score was composed by Vangelis (born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou on March 29, 1943, in Agria, Greece) on a Yamaha CS-80 polyphonic synthesizer in his London studio in late 1981.
2019 Los Angeles
The Los Angeles 2019 the film constructed was, by 1982 standards, the most detailed urban cinematic environment ever built. The exterior city, shot on the Warner Bros. Burbank Old New York Street backlot redressed for production, used heavy artificial rain, smoke, neon signage, and Asian-language storefronts to construct a city that was American but felt Japanese, Chinese, and Mexican. The set decoration was specifically engineered to suggest cultural mixing. Coca-Cola, Atari, Pan Am, RCA, Bell Telephone, Trans World Airlines, and Cuisinart all paid for advertising placement in the film. Of those companies, Pan Am, Atari, RCA, Bell Telephone, and Trans World Airlines would all file for bankruptcy or be dissolved within ten years of the film’s release. The pattern became known among fans as the “Blade Runner curse.”
The Tyrell Corporation pyramid, the headquarters of the replicant-manufacturing corporation, was rendered using a model two hundred and seventy feet tall in the foreground composite shot with painted backgrounds. The pyramid’s slope angle is approximately forty-five degrees, designed by Syd Mead to invoke both Mesoamerican and Egyptian pyramidal forms. The Bradbury Building, the actual 1893 commercial building at 304 South Broadway in downtown Los Angeles, designed by architect George Wyman, was used for the interior scenes of J.F. Sebastian’s apartment. The Bradbury’s wrought-iron staircase and skylight have appeared in dozens of subsequent films, but the Blade Runner association is the strongest.
The Spinner flying cars, designed by Syd Mead, combined visual references to 1950s American automobile design (the chrome detailing, the wraparound windscreen) with then-current Japanese sport coupe aesthetics (the wedge profile, the low-slung body). The off-world advertising blimps that drift through several exterior scenes carry messages encouraging the population to relocate to the off-world colonies. The giant geisha advertisement, projected on the side of a building over the rainy street, became the single most-imitated visual element of the film.
The wardrobe, designed by Charles Knode and Michael Kaplan, mixed 1940s film noir tailoring with East Asian, 1980s punk, and futurist elements. Sean Young’s Rachael wore tailored 1940s-cut suits with sharply structured shoulders, her hair pulled into a tight bun with a side parting that exposed the geometry of her neck. Daryl Hannah’s Pris wore distressed white face paint with a black eye band across her face, her hair spiked and asymmetrical, in a costume that combined punk-rock and gothic-doll influences. Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty wore a leather jacket over a white tank top with bleached white hair, in a costume that has been imitated in fashion editorial photography continuously since 1982.
The Director’s Cut, 1992
Blade Runner disappeared from theatrical circulation in late 1982. The film began a slow cult rediscovery on home video, on cable television, and at university film societies through the mid-1980s. The cyberpunk literary genre was emerging in parallel: William Gibson’s novella “Burning Chrome” (1982), Bruce Sterling’s anthology Mirrorshades (1986), and, most consequentially, William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (published by Ace Books on July 1, 1984, winner of the 1984 Nebula and 1985 Hugo Award) all drew directly on the Blade Runner visual aesthetic. Gibson has said in subsequent interviews that he saw Blade Runner in a Vancouver theater shortly after its release and was relieved that the visual world he had been imagining for his then-in-progress novel had already been built by someone else.
In May 1990, the UCLA film archive screened a workprint of Blade Runner that had been discovered in the Warner Bros. vaults. The workprint did not include the Harrison Ford voiceover. It did not include the happy-ending sequence. It included a brief unicorn-dream sequence that had been cut from the theatrical release. The Los Angeles screening produced sufficient critical demand that Warner Bros. agreed in 1991 to produce a new theatrical cut of the film. The 1992 Director’s Cut, supervised by Ridley Scott from the workprint, was released theatrically in approximately 230 American theaters on Friday, September 11, 1992. It grossed approximately three million dollars in limited theatrical release and produced the strongest critical reassessment of any commercial film of the 1980s. Blade Runner was, by the end of 1992, no longer a failure.
A 2007 Final Cut, the only version of the film over which Ridley Scott had full editorial control, was released theatrically on October 5, 2007, and remains the canonical version. Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, was released October 6, 2017, thirty-five years after the original. The film grossed approximately two hundred and sixty million dollars worldwide and was nominated for five Academy Awards. It received a critical reception that was, in its first weekend, approximately the inverse of the original’s: praised by reviewers, commercially disappointing relative to its production budget.
The visual lexicon Blade Runner built had, by then, become inescapable. Every cyberpunk film of the next forty years (the Matrix trilogy, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Strange Days, Minority Report, Children of Men), every cyberpunk video game (Deus Ex, System Shock, the Cyberpunk 2077 franchise), every dystopian-future fashion editorial campaign, and every late-twentieth-century reimagining of an Asian-inflected urban future drew from Blade Runner‘s specific visual specifications. Philip K. Dick had described his novel in 1968 as an attempt to imagine a near future in which the line between human and android became philosophically untenable. Ridley Scott had described his film in 1982 as an attempt to imagine a near future in which Los Angeles became Tokyo. Both descriptions were too modest. The film built a city. The city became the visual reference for the future.
Coppola needed Sicily and a wedding scene. Scott needed Los Angeles in the rain, forty days of synthetic mist, a Greek composer with a Yamaha CS-80, an industrial designer who had drawn Buck Rogers, and a British director willing to lose money for ten years. The Godfather was profitable in 1972 and canonical by 1980. Blade Runner failed in 1982 and was canonical by 1992. Both films took a decade to become themselves.