Blade Runner failed due to ‘industrial espionage’, says Sir Ridley Scott
Sir Ridley Scott thinks bad reviews of 'Blade Runner' cemented the movie as a box office bomb in 1982.
Sir Ridley Scott thinks ‘Blade Runner’ flopped because of “industrial espionage”.
The Harrison Ford-starring sci-fi flick bombed at the box office when it hit cinemas in 1982, and the 87-year-old director has now pointed to bad reviews of the film from the likes of The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael as the main reason why ‘Blade Runner’ never got the chance to commercially succeed.
In a roundtable interview for The Hollywood Reporter, Scott said: “It enters the realm of industrial espionage. You’re destroying the subject before it’s out and [Kael] wrote this for the very posh …The New Yorker.
“I was actually kind of distressed, I mean enraged, so I wrote to the editor, saying, ‘If you hate me that much, just ignore me, don’t write anything.’ I never got a reply.”
While its release didn’t impress financially, ‘Blade Runner’ got a second chance after it was discovered at the Santa Monica Film Festival roughly a decade later which ultimately allowed the movie to become a cult classic.
The ‘Gladiator II’ director continued: “Then it was discovered in the Santa Monica Film Festival about 10 years later. There had been one or two die hards who quite liked it when it came out.
“So they called up Warner [Bros.] for a print and they had lost the negative. And so they went to a drawer and pulled out the drawer, didn’t look at it, sent it to the festival.
“It was minus the voiceover, had a bit of Vangelis, a bit of Jerry Goldsmith on it, and it ran and that reignited the whole thing. That’s the craziness of Hollywood.”
‘Blade Runner’ - which also stars Sean Young, Daryl Hannah and the late Rutger Hauer - follows special police officer Rick Deckard (Ford), known as a Blade Runner, whose job is to track down rogue replicant androids.
In 2017, sequel ‘Blade Runner 2049’, directed by Denis Villeneuve, Ford returned to reprise his role as Deckard, while Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas and Jared Leto also starred.
Scott was initially announced as the director of the movie in 2011, though was forced to step down due to a scheduling conflict with ‘Alien: Covenant’ - leaving ‘Dune’ filmmaker Villeneuve to helm the flick instead.
Reflecting on his departure, Scott admitted he regretted exiting ‘Blade Runner 2049’.
He told Empire magazine: “I shouldn’t have had to make that decision. But I had to. I should have done Blade Runner 2.”
While he wasn’t in the director’s chair for ‘Blade Runner 2049’, Scott was still involved in the project and served as executive producer.
