Nobody wanted Blade Runner.
The box office in 1982 belonged to E.T. and Rocky III. Audiences shrugged when the dark, dour Blade Runner hit theaters; even the critics who gawped at the film’s baroque visuals tore apart everything else. “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision,” Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times—before pointing out it was “a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have,” and sniping at director Ridley Scott for expecting “overdecoration to carry a film that has neither strong characters nor a strong story.”