Why Blade Runner 2049 Flopped So Hard

3. It Demands Too Much Of Its Audience Ahead Of Time

If you're a mainstream audience member coming in to Blade Runner 2049, it basically asks you to do homework to get up to speed on what's happening. That might just mean watching Blade Runner (though there's no indication that you'll actually learn all that much of use from it), but there's also tie-in satellite material that fills in gaps and sets the landscape.

And on top of that, you probably have to go and read around the production of the original movie, the mythology of the universe and the complex readings of the film and its philosophical ramifications. It's not an easy movie you can just dip into and know where you are and what to expect - you need to put in establishing work.

Some would say that that is brave and admirable, but it's not what the kind of audience who spends on these movies expects. And even more fundamentally, that audience doesn't really know what Blade Runner is: it's not the huge brand its fans think it is (at least not in mainstream terms), and the confidence in it is very similar to the misguided faith in the Dark Tower, King Arthur and John Carter that gave them all huge budgets.

On an executive's paper, it sounds good (and looking at social media offers a skewed picture of how popular it is), but in real terms, it simply doesn't have the same pulling power.