Though Ridley Scott helped create two of the most influential sci-fi worlds ever put on screen with Alien and Blade Runner, his commercial track record in the genre has been far less consistent. The original Blade Runner famously underperformed in 1982, and that uneven streak appears to have continued with this year’s The Dog Stars, which recruited Josh Brolin, Jacob Elordi and Margaret Qualley and still looks set to land among the lowest-grossing films of his career.
However, what has often worked in Scott’s favor is that his sci-fi tends to be reappraised long after its initial release, and the clearest recent example may be playing out again now. Blade Runner 2049, the 164-minute sequel Scott produced through Scott Free after handing directing duties to Denis Villeneuve, underperformed in theaters in 2017 and has spent much of this month appearing in streaming top 10s across dozens of countries, nearly a decade after many treated it as a commercial disappointment.
‘Blade Runner 2049’ Is Climbing the Streaming Charts Again
Blade Runner 2049 grossed somewhere north of $150 million before marketing and topped out around $260 million worldwide, a total that reportedly left its backers facing a substantial loss, and that got blamed on everything from the runtime to a marketing campaign so secretive it barely told audiences what the movie was. The irony is that critics adored it almost unanimously, Roger Deakins finally won his long-overdue Oscar for its cinematography, and the film’s reputation has only compounded since, to the point where calling it one of the best sci-fi sequels ever made barely counts as a hot take anymore.
Following its return to streaming after a long stretch of limited availability, the film has been running inside HBO Max’s global top 10 movies chart for much of September, holding chart positions in markets from Brazil to Argentina through the week of Sept. 14 and climbing as high as third in some territories.
The Sci-Fi Flop Turned Classic Is Finding a New Audience on Streaming
Prime Video releases Blade Runner 2099 on Nov. 25, the franchise’s first television series, set 50 years after the events of 2049, with Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer leading the cast and Scott producing. It is being positioned as a direct continuation rather than a soft reboot, which makes 2049 a required viewing. It also arrives at an interesting moment for Scott’s stewardship of his old universe. He announced just weeks ago that he’s developing a new Alien film built around Michael Fassbender’s David from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and between that project and 2099 the 88-year-old director is effectively running both of his signature franchises as a producer while directing more selectively himself.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
