A tortured production, Blade Runner went through many different edits as it was passed between the frustrated director, Alien 's Ridley Scott, and a tentative studio. The distributors were worried the film would bomb as audiences might not connect with this adaptation of the cult sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Blade Runner was ambitious and uncompromising in its strange story of Deckard, a possibly robotic cop who is sent to seek out and destroy replicants, rogue robots who can easily pass for humans. In the years since the Final Cut's release, fans have understandably wanted to know which is the best version of Blade Runner.
It's a reasonable inquiry as each edit of the movie has its ardent defenders. But for Ridley Scott completists, the differences in the Final Cut - which included restoration to sound and visuals and some digital fixes - are what make it the definitive and best version of this Philip K Dick adaptation.
So what are these differences? Well, chief amongst them is the complete re-addition of its more violent moments and the full restoration of the movie's in famous unicorn dream sequence, which was incredibly important alongside the director's cut's removal of the studio-mandated happy ending.
Now director Ridley Scott was no stranger to the grim specter of some gory sci-fi violence. After all, his most recent release at the time of this film's production was an iconic sci-fi horror Alien , leading the director to include a fun Alien easter egg in Blade Runner.
But the studio was concerned by the violent content in Blade Runne r's theatrical cut. Thus they opted to cut out a lot of cutting and slicing. This included a re-shot death scene for Zhora that gives her demise more dignity and replaces the stunt performer's face with that of Lee Pulford, but also some more infamous gore. The scene in which Tyrell is killed at the hands of Roy once again includes his eyes being gouged out, which the director's cut left out. This Final Cut version of the film incorporates more grisly shots of Batty giving himself bloody stigmata, steeped in religious symbolism that emphasizes his god complex.
This sequence also contrasts Batty's tragic villain status with Deckard's alignment with Judas, which is a possibility for the film to remind viewers that the hero of the movie could be a replicant himself, killing his fellow replicants. This Christian symbolism is much stronger with this restored violence in the movie.
But another element of the Blade Runner Final Cut — the addition of the full unicorn dream sequence combined with this and the removal of the terrible original theatrical ending that help to more thrillingly make sense of the film's plot. This is an incomplete version of the film, as it had not yet been color-corrected or sound mixed and it lacked several parts of Vangelis ' score. Ridley Scott stated that the workprint was "something that was pretty rough, but close enough to what I was after to let a preview audience see.
This version was rediscovered in by Michael Arick , who initially believed it to be the international cut. It was screened the following year at the Los Angeles Fairfax Theater as part of a 70mm spring festival. During this screening is when it was discovered to actually be a surviving copy of the workprint. Because the workprint was closer to Ridley Scott's vision for the film than the theatrical cuts, Arick became interested in producing a reconstruction of the film, an effort that ultimately resulted in the Director's Cut.
The Denver and Dallas sneak previews garnered a lukewarm reaction, which prompted several changes that resulted in the theatrical versions. While the workprint contained one piece of narration by Deckard , more were added at the request of studio executives after test audience members indicated difficulty understanding the film. Although several different versions of the script had included a narration of some sort, both Ridley Scott and Harrison Ford disliked the studio voice-over and resisted having it added to the film.
It has been suggested that Ford intentionally performed the voice-over poorly in the hope it would not be used, but Ford has denied this. In an interview with Playboy magazine in , Ford was asked about the voice-over if he "deliberately read it badly, hoping they'd drop it? I delivered it to the best of my ability given that I had no input. I never thought they'd use it. But I didn't try and sandbag it. It was simply bad narration. When I first agreed to do the film, I told Ridley there was too much information given to the audience in narration.
We have to create a narrative. They had already thrown Ridley off the movie - they were over budget. So I was compelled by my contract to record this narration. The American and international theatrical versions released by the studio also included a "happy ending. Additionally, Scott had grown distasteful of the scene, wishing to end the film on a more uncertain note. After the mixed response from the test screenings, this ending was rewritten, filmed, and appended to the film.
The filmed "happy ending" was shot in March and incorporated unused footage from Stanley Kubrick 's The Shining. In May , the American theatrical version was screened for a sneak preview audience in San Diego, California, but with the addition of two brief shots not present in the later theatrical cuts of the film.
The first shows Roy Batty stepping out of a Vid-Phon booth a shot that re-emerged in The Final Cut and the second is an overhead shot of Deckard driving at the opening of the happy ending. The San Diego screening garnered a more enthusiastic response than the Dallas and Denver showings, but some in attendance indicated its pace being too slow, so Scott cut the two aforementioned shots.
The Vid-Phon booth segment was replaced with Roy looking at his clenching hand, accomplished by altering two shots that appear later in the film. The international cut, also known as the Unrated Version, is largely identical to the American theatrical release but with extra violence added in three scenes. This is the version of the film widely available on home video throughout the s and the cut of the film that was distributed on a widescreen LaserDisc by Criterion with supplementary material.
A television edit of the American theatrical version premiered on CBS in In this edit, cuts were made to the film's violence, profanity, and sexual content in order to meet broadcast restrictions. The opening crawl also featured different text, read aloud by an uncredited actor.
In , Warner Bros. However, Ridley Scott publicly disowned the workprint version of the film as his definitive Director's Cut, citing that it was roughly edited and lacked the score composed for the film by Vangelis.
In response to Scott's dissatisfaction and in part because of the film's resurgent cult popularity by the early 90s Warner Bros. They hired Michael Arick, who had rediscovered the workprint of Blade Runner and who was already doing consultation work for them, to head the project with Scott. He started by spending several months in London with Les Healey , who had been the assistant editor on Blade Runner , attempting to compile a list of the changes that Scott wanted made to the film.
However, due to time constraints, several of these suggestions were never accomplished. Some of these have never appeared in any version of the film, such as the re-insertion of a scene where Deckard visits Holden in a hospital.
Scott made three major requests for the Director's Cut. The first was the removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over, an aspect of the film he had disliked since these were added after the Dallas and Denver screenings. The second request was the re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest, which had been left out of the theatrical versions.
The third was the removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending" seen in the theatrical cuts. Arick worked on the cut until January , trusting the rest to Warner Bros. Tagging in instead is video producer Creighton DeSimone! This was planned. Everything is fine. Creighton : While T. The status quo. The accepted choice. The Theatrical Release is like chocolate and pickles. The two versions of the film actually share a lot in common. The scenes run in the same order, too. The differences are minor, but they add up, changing a lot about the tone and some of the smaller story beats.
The narration feels extremely tacked-on. Everything about it is wrong: Ford speaks in a dull monotone, the dialogue is written out of sync with the way the character speaks and acts, and it seems to be slotted in wherever the producers felt they could squeeze it. The voiceover generally comes during transitional scenes that show off the world. The Final Cut sets out to captivate the audience, not spoon-feed them.
Undermining your opponent by campaigning that you have the easy job is an interesting tactic, but I feel you never got off the runway here. Could this be a long con? Your own version of a slow movie, so to speak?
A round of applause for Bryan , who appears to have turned self-loathing into an argument strategy. A strong start for Bryan, but can he keep it up? Bryan: Thanks for your intervention there, Megan. What the hell, T. How do you mic-drop an online discussion with no mics? Creighton, I enjoy your attempt to frame defending the Theatrical Cut — which is about as beloved as the ending of Lost — as the easier job, somehow.
In any case, in terms of mood and feel, the Theatrical Cut of Blade Runner changed the trajectory of cinema. Up until that point, we were on a run where robots and science fiction vistas meant raucous, operatic adventures. Ridley Scott did so many things right, and so differently for the era, Blade Runner is worthy of all the praise it received in However, the Theatrical Cut, feels like a film that would have been ripe for a remake in the post- Matrix world of the early s.
In all of these cases, the original films are full of great characters, great world-building, and great structure, but they leave the audience wanting just a little more, because they looked stylistically dated by The voiceover and the theatrical ending date Blade Runner in a way that would have made it a perfect candidate for a remake Bryan: Wait a second.
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