Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is without a doubt one of the greatest movies to have ever bombed at the box office, with critics and audiences at the time resolutely failing to wrap their heads around the filmmaker’s complex dystopian sci-fi. In the decades since, though, it’s gone on to earn a well-deserved reputation as one of the genre’s finest efforts, regardless of which cut you prefer.
A sequel languished in development hell for decades before Denis Villeneuve brought Blade Runner 2049 to life, with the Arrival director riding high on the success of his last foray into sci-fi, which was a major commercial success and scored eight Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director.
However, despite 2049 receiving the sort of hugely enthusiastic reviews that evaded its predecessor the first time around, the reception from audiences was much colder. The $185 million epic only made $260 million in theaters, ending any hopes of the third entry that many of the key creatives had admitted they’d be more than interesting in making.
In fact, in a recent interview, Jared Leto has said that he’d love to revisit the world of Blade Runner 2049 to further explore his villainous Niander Wallace, which is pretty understandable when the character came off as more than a little undercooked in the finished product.
“You know, with every character I play, I don’t know if it’s because I work so intently and I tend to dig really deep and put a lot of time and energy into it, but when I’m done playing with them, done playing the parts, I do miss them a little bit. And you do all this work anyway, it would be kind of nice to go back and explore other characters. Like Niander Wallace in Blade Runner, I would love to play that part again as a prequel or something. You do all this work and then you’re done, so it is nice to revisit things.”
The biggest success experienced by Blade Runner 2049 was that it finally saw Roger Deakins win that long overdue Oscar for Best Cinematography at the fourteenth time of asking, with the box office and home video sales not generating the sort of numbers that would encourage Warner Bros. to move forward on any further adventures. However, Villeneuve swiftly boarded his next mega budget sci-fi project, with Dune now set for release in October.
