Trailer
Plot summary
By 2019, the Tyrell Corporation builds replicants, human-like androids used as laborers on off-world colonies. After a mutiny they are banned on Earth, and blade runner units retire any who come back. Four Nexus-6 models reach Los Angeles: Roy Batty, their leader, plus Zhora, Pris and Leon Kowalski. After Leon shoots a blade runner during a test, officer Gaff brings former blade runner Rick Deckard to his old boss, Bryant, who pressures him into taking the case. Bryant's files name the four and note that each Nexus-6 was built with a four-year lifespan. Deckard is then sent to the Tyrell Corporation to try the Voight-Kampff test on a Nexus-6. Roy and Leon confront the eye engineer Hannibal Chew, who says only Tyrell can extend their lives and names J.F. Sebastian as a man who might get Roy in.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Blade Runner (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The logos of Atari, Bell, Coca-Cola, Cuisinart, Pan Am and RCA, all market leaders at the time, were displayed as product placement, and all experienced setbacks after release, prompting talk of a Blade Runner curse; Coca-Cola and Cuisinart recovered, and Tsingtao beer did better afterwards.
- Tesla's Cybertruck was inspired by the film: Elon Musk promised it would "look like something out of Blade Runner", referred to it as the Blade Runner Truck and timed its debut to the film's November 2019 setting, and art designer Syd Mead said he was flattered.
- Crew members made T-shirts during filming reading "Yes Guv'nor, My Ass", mocking Ridley Scott's unfavourable comparison of U.S. and British crews; Scott answered with a shirt of his own reading "Xenophobia Sucks", and the episode became known as the T-shirt war.
- Casting Deckard proved troublesome: screenwriter Hampton Fancher wrote the dialogue with Robert Mitchum in mind, Gene Hackman, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino and Burt Reynolds were considered, and Ridley Scott spent months discussing the role with Dustin Hoffman, who departed over differences in vision.
- It is often falsely claimed that the unicorn sequence was an outtake from Ridley Scott's follow-up film Legend, which also features unicorns; it was in fact shot for Blade Runner as additional photography by second unit cinematographer Brian Tufano.
- Harrison Ford disliked the voiceover: he said it had been tacitly agreed when shooting started that the film would run without voiceover narration, and that he thought it had worked that way, but he was then stuck re-creating that narration.
- Daryl Hannah played the "basic pleasure model" replicant Pris after Debbie Harry turned the role down; Stacey Nelkin auditioned for Pris as well and was given another part in the film, which was cut before filming.
- Delays and poor reproductions of Vangelis's score led to many bootlegs: a tape surfaced at science fiction conventions in 1982, and in 1993 Off World Music, Ltd created a bootleg CD more comprehensive than Vangelis's official CD of 1994.
