18 Mind-Blowing Facts About Blade Runner

11. It's Nothing Like The Source Material

Blade Runner Ridley Scott
Warner Bros.

Though most of the main characters and the bare bones of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? make it into Blade Runner, there are a lot of difference between the film and its source material.

The book, for example, was set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco rather than Los Angeles and Deckard was an actively employed rather than retired android bounty hunter. There’s also no mention of blade runners and replicants anywhere in Dick’s original novel.

Ridley Scott borrowed the term blade runner from an unrelated 1979 sci-fi novella by William S. Burroughs which was itself a story treatment for a film adaptation of writer Alan E. Nourse’s The Bladerunner that never came into fruition, while replicants were inspired by screenwriter David Webb Peoples’ daughter who was studying cell replication at the time.

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