10 Philip K Dick Movie Adaptations Ranked Best To Worst

Shortly before his death in 1982, Philip K Dick received a copy of Blade Runner’s shooting script. “It was excellent,” he wrote. “It had nothing to do with the book.”

As an adaptation of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner is a miserable failure – it misses the satire, the tongue-in-cheek tone and reduces the story to a simple hunt for “replicants”. Judged on its own terms, however, it’s one of the most influential movies of the last forty years.

Released into American theatres on June 25 1982, Blade Runner proved unable to compete against Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and ET: The Extra-Terrestrial because of a studio-imposed handicap. Saddled with an extraneous voiceover and a truly bizarre ending cobbled together from footage shot for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the movie polarized critics, while audiences remained indifferent, resulting in a $33 million gross on a budget of $28 million.

There was a good film in there somewhere, but it took 25 years for the “Final Cut” to reach DVD. In that time, Blade Runner set a new trend for visual design, influencing the Battlestar Galactica reboot as well as the Ghost In The Shell film series.