Why Blade Runner Is The Best Sci-Fi Movie Of All Time

We’ve been collectively brainwashed into thinking of box office draw as a definitive metric, and that’s a little tragic. Obviously, a movie that makes a billion dollars has more short-term cultural impact than one that doesn’t do as well. But a film’s immediate financial pull is not the be-all, end-all. For proof, look no further than Blade Runner.

During the summer of ’82, Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) only racked up about $26 million off a $30 million budget, according to Variety. But while it was initially considered a severe disappointment, not quite 40 years later, calling Blade Runner the greatest sci-fi movie of all time isn’t even much of a hot take. In fact, it’s a pretty common opinion.

Some credit for that belongs to the proliferation of home video throughout the ’80s and ’90s, as well as director Ridley Scott taking the opportunity to release multiple re-edits over the years. (This might be a good opportunity to establish we’re talking about and spoiling The Final Cut – not necessarily any of the other versions — in this article.)  But the most credit of all belongs to Blade Runner itself for being so great.

Blade Runner is better than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blade Runner is better than Back to the Future. If Star Wars counted as sci-fi (which it doesn’t because it’s fantasy set in space, and that isn’t the same thing), none of the Star Wars movies could compete with this classic. Why do we feel this way? Feast thine eyes upon the reasons.

To be clear, anxiety surrounding the prospect of sentient technology provided a basis for sci-fi and horror stories way before Philip K. Dick came up with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in 1968. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein predates Dick’s era by more than a century, and it expresses similar concerns about the hypothetical treatment of an artificial humankind that the OG humankind might create someday.

But when we take a story about self-aware tech, set it in a densely packed city during a post-global catastrophe future, add in loads of kinetic action sequences, pack it with philosophical angst, and make sure it’s raining constantly, well, that sounds like a familiar recipe, doesn’t it? Reminds you a little bit of Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix, yeah? That’s because Blade Runner set the template for those and other stories in the cyberpunk sub-genre, which has since become influential across virtually all media. For a prominent recent instance, consider HBO’s Westworld. Although based on a 1973 TV movie that more-or-less predates the sub-genre, the modern version fully embraces cyberpunk tropes like quasi-omnipotent corporations, a future dystopia, and melodramatic robots.

Setting cyberpunk aside, we could even reach a little further and suggest the synthetic characters in Terminator 2, Her, and Ex Machina all develop their more human qualities in a manner reminiscent of Blade Runner’s replicants.