10 Sci-Fi Movies That Ignored The Critics

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 93%

Metacritic Score: 84

Much like The Thing, Blade Runner is these days considered a classic, receiving glowing praise from all avenues. But don't let the current numbers fool you. The Blade Runner hype train didn't leave the station until many years after the film's initial release, and the phenomenon we know today, encompassing Denis Villeneuve's sublime addition to the canon in 2017 (Blade Runner 2049), was a long time coming.

The 1982 flick did not do well upon release and subsequently did not make a lot of money at the box office. Adapted from Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968), Blade Runner was considered slow, wordy, complicated and requiring of the kind of thought that audiences and critics who had just got used to Harrison Ford as a space opera action hero weren't prepared for. Dismissed as an art house sci-fi dud, the film didn't even make back its production budget back during its initial run, and might have been lost in the annals of cinema if it weren't for the bullishness of its director, Ridley Scott.

A director's cut of Blade Runner was released in 1992, shifting several key facets of the film, such as Ford's monotonous narration, and helping it achieve mainstream success alongside its cult status. Scott and the studio have put out more cuts of the film than you can shake an origami unicorn at in the years since, but the less said about that the better.