And in a fortuitous confluence of events, it fell into Scott’s hands just after he walked away from directing an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune (which would become an even more reviled celluloid disaster helmed by David Lynch in 1984).
#Pieces 1982 box office cracked#
Then, Hampton Fancher, the credited writer of the version we now know, finally cracked it-or came close enough-in 1977. But Dick, a tough customer if ever there was one, raged at every single script he’d seen. At one point, Martin Scorsese was flirting with directing it. Dick’s thickety 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the seemingly unfilmable project had been bouncing around for years.
But by the time that he signed on for his adaptation of Philip K.
After establishing his genre bona fides with 1979’s Alien, Ridley Scott had no shortage of options for his follow-up film. Both, in their own ways, had had ominously rocky roads to the big screen. It wasn’t just the slew of competition that doomed these two films that are now regarded as integral pieces of the sci-fi canon. If you worked at a major studio in 1982, the new box-office conventional-wisdom dictated that sci-fi geeks came out in hordes when air-conditioning was on the menu. After all, both 1977’s A New Hope and 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back opened in May. But still, why not spread the wealth around a little? Well, as with just about all things, you can pin the blame on Star Wars. In addition to Blade Runner and The Thing, 1982 also gave us Poltergeist, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Tron, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, and Steven Spielberg’s 800-pound box-office gorilla, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial all within the same barely-ajar ten-week summer window. It also turned out to be a ridiculously loaded boom-year for science fiction movies-an embarrassment of intergalactic riches.
#Pieces 1982 box office movie#
But the movie business was a different beast in 1982. Why weren’t they spaced out a little? Today, of course, there are armies of highly-paid statisticians who crunch tons of numbers to circumvent that exact problem. It’s tempting to look back with the benefit of hindsight and wonder how two movies that targeted the same exact demographic could have been scheduled to open on the same weekend.
Rutger Hauer's Blade Runner Speech Was Brilliant
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