There’s something inherently hilarious—and borderline tragic—about reading early studio notes for Blade Runner. You can feel the tension dripping off the page, a cocktail of confusion, frustration, and outright disdain for a movie they couldn’t wrap their heads around.
“This movie gets worse every screening,” one executive lamented, as though Blade Runner was some sort of recurring fever dream that kept getting more incomprehensible every time they revisited it. If it weren’t so funny, it’d be heartbreaking.
But let’s step back and set the scene: It’s January 1981. Ridley Scott is fresh off the high of Alien, a movie that scared audiences so badly they probably considered sleeping with the lights on for the rest of their lives.
Now, he’s directing a visually stunning, existential sci-fi noir based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Sounds like a home run, right? Not to the executives.
What Scott had delivered was dark, slow, moody, and enigmatic—a world meticulously crafted but, to them, deadly dull. Imagine ordering a blockbuster hamburger and getting a fine dining experience you didn’t know how to eat.
The notes are brutal. They complain about the pacing: “Up to Zhora’s death the picture is deadly dull.” They hate the voice-over: “This voice-over is terrible, the audience will fall asleep.” They nitpick the editing: “Deckard takes forever to come into the building.”
And perhaps my favorite: “Pris’ tongue is sticking out in the wide shot after Batty has kissed her.” Somewhere, Ridley Scott was likely reading these and resisting the urge to fling a cigarette across the room.
The infamous voice-over—long maligned as one of the weakest elements of the original theatrical cut—gets roasted harder than a burnt coffee bean. The executives weren’t wrong in their critique; they called it “dry and monotone” and asked if Harrison Ford was “on drugs” while recording it. Ford himself admitted he phoned it in, likely out of spite because the studio forced its inclusion. It’s a rare moment where everyone—fans, directors, actors, and even executives—agreed on something: the voice-over sucked. But this isn’t just a story about bad voice-overs; it’s about what happens when art collides with commerce, and neither side speaks the same language.
The execs seemed particularly baffled by the film’s deliberate pacing and lack of conventional thrills. They wanted more “action,” more “tits” in the Zhora scene, more of… something. Something that would make this weird, cerebral movie feel like the summer blockbuster they thought they’d signed up for. Instead, they got meditations on what it means to be human, wrapped in a moody, rain-soaked visual symphony. No wonder they didn’t know what to do with it.
But the real kicker is this: for all their complaints, for all their talk of firing Scott and taking over the editing themselves, the film we eventually got in theaters wasn’t even the one Scott wanted to release. The version they deemed “ready” was laced with compromises—a forced happy ending, that now-infamous voice-over, and tightened pacing that cut into the film’s atmospheric depth. It was a movie designed to appease the suits, and yet it still flopped at the box office, overshadowed by E.T. and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The irony, of course, is that Blade Runner is now revered as one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made. What the studio execs dismissed as “deadly dull” is celebrated as methodical and haunting. The visuals they didn’t understand are now iconic. And the themes they found confusing—identity, mortality, the limits of humanity—are the very reasons the film has endured. Over the years, Scott would revisit Blade Runner, releasing multiple cuts that stripped away the studio’s meddling. The “Final Cut,” released in 2007, is considered the definitive version, finally fulfilling Scott’s original vision.
Reading these notes now is like unearthing a time capsule of cluelessness. It’s a reminder that some art isn’t made for the moment; it’s made for the long haul. The studio execs were so focused on what Blade Runner wasn’t—a fast-paced, crowd-pleasing blockbuster—that they missed what it was: a slow-burning, visually stunning meditation on what it means to be alive.
In the end, Blade Runner outlived its critics, its poor box office showing, and even its own studio notes. It’s the ultimate cinematic irony: a movie dismissed by its own creators became a masterpiece precisely because it refused to cater to their demands. And somewhere, Ridley Scott is probably smirking, knowing that he won the long game.
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