‘Blade Runner’ is considered one of the undisputed masterpieces of science fiction in history. Today it seems difficult for an adaptation of Philip K Dickdirected by Ridley Scottwith Harrison Ford and a lot of technical advances is not seen as a classic, but it takes an exercise in abstraction to assimilate that this recognition took at least a decade to take shape.
At the time of launch, in 1982, at ‘Blade Runner’ did not do exceptionally well at the box office, the ‘Star Wars’ saga was breaking and viewers did not assimilate the dark world proposed by Ridley Scott after ‘Alien, the eighth passenger’ (1979), going from seeing it in the cinema, with the antidote from ‘ET, el extraterrestre’ (1982) doing the same counterpoint as to ‘The Thing’ (The Thing, 1982), also considered today as one of the greatest pieces of modern horror.
## The change of cultural tableau in the 90s
But in the 90s things changed. The *edgy* and countercultural armor was more akin to murky cinema, looking for dark and violent versions of genre cinema. The impact of anime [‘Akira’](https://www.espinof.com/tag/akira) (1988) was already affecting commercial cinema in the United States and you could see really rough and lumpy science fiction films, some in the wake of Scott’s film and the latency of **Katsuhiro Ōtomo**’s success as ‘[Días Extraños](https://www.espinof.com/criticas/ciencia-ficcion-dias-extranos-de-kathryn-bigelow)’ (Strange Days, 1992), because, somehow, ‘Blade Runner’ was a cult film Underground. The funny thing is that **if it wasn’t for a little mishap, it might not have gotten out of an eternal specialized tracking loop**.
Recently many people on have been responding to this twitter message asking what great movies they saw in the theater to which **filmmaker Bruce Wright replied**: >”The director’s cut of ‘Blade Runner’ accidentally shown instead of of the cinema assembly. Then I mounted a campaign to publish it. And I succeeded”.
Director’s cut of Blade Runner accidentally shown instead of the theatrical cut. I then mounted a campaign to get it released. And succeeded. https://t.co/lTShwIgVVQ
— Bruce Wright (@heybrucewright) February 4, 2021
Probably, the most fans of ‘Blade Runner’ already know the story, but now Wright’s previous thread gives many more details that give more idea of the great coincidence that supposed that he himself was at that time and that place when the mistake happened . It can also be read in more detail at [este artículo de Los Angeles Time](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-blade-runner-2-turan-19920913-story.html), but in short, we may not be talking about the movie right now in the same terms, not even that their [secuela de Denis Villeneuve](https://www.espinof.com/criticas/blade-runner-2049-es-una-dazzling-replica-con-un-guion-anodino).
## The director’s cut that changed everything In 1990, a 70mm print of ‘**Blade Runner**’ arrived from Warner Bros. at a repertory theater in Los Angeles, but the print was not the known version of the film, which had flopped at the box office in large part because the studio required Scott to make changes to clear up the film’s mysteries, such as the explanatory voiceover. **The screening had no such soundtrack and the ending was left open**, and the audience couldn’t believe what they were seeing, thinking that they were facing the original version of **Ridley Scott**.
**Michael Arick**, who was director of asset management for Warner Bros. in 1989, **randomly found the copy**. I knew it wasn’t the normal version but I never saw it, until the reels ended up in a shipment for projection: >”I was in the vault of the projection room of Todd-AO, looking for images of ‘Gypsy’, when I came across with a 70-millimeter print of ‘Blade Runner.’ What probably happened was that no one had agreed to pick it up after a screening. To save it from collectors, I hid it in the lot.” However, what was seen that night was not Ridley Scott’s “Director’s Cut” as we know it now because it was not a finished version. The movie **lacked the unicorn dream sequences** key to Deckard’s identity, some of the music was temporary and something else was different. Wright **wrote about the showing in the Los Angeles Times Sunday calendar**, which got moviegoers interested in the story.
## Resurrection and Hysteria Then **organized a letter-writing campaign to Warner Brothers on online movie forums, the article sparked interest in the unexpected** alternative version of ‘**Blade Runner**’ and after the great response from the fans, Warner Bros itself organized some screenings announcing it as “the version never seen ahead of its time”, but this did not make Ridley Scott funny, who assured that this “was not his version”.
So after negotiations and discussions with Scott himself, Warner Bros. tracked down the unicorn footage and let him finish the film the way he originally intended. **The director’s cut was finally published in 1992, 10 years after the original version**. This created a renewed interest in the film and its universe that has only grown ever since. It’s possible that without the rediscovery of the ’90s we would have seen a lavish and expensive sequel like Denis Villeneuve’s. Then there would be other new modifications, which would end up in the acclaimed ‘Final cut’ of 2007, but that’s another story, which **might not have happened if a Warner Bros. executive hadn’t fortuitously found a copy** and sent it by mistake to a Los Angeles movie theater, which turned out to be packed with **fans who knew the original movie so well** that they instantly noticed they were watching a new ‘**Blade Runner**’.
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