Updated March 11, 2024 – Like its predecessor, Blade Runner 2049 didn’t fare well at the box office. Though expected to be a financial hit, the film grossed less than $100 million domestic. Why?
I’m not exactly sure why audiences didn’t connect better with this movie. I myself didn’t want to rewatch it, and I wondered why. Studying the film, I came up with three possibilities:
Ridley Scott stated he would have taken out 30 minutes of the film’s nearly three hours. “It’s slow. It’s slow. Long. Too long. I would have taken out half an hour.”1 Visually, there’s a lot of stunning cinematagraphy by Roger Deakins (see article here). But the footage crawls along with no real benefit to the plot.
Ana de Armas is gorgeous, no doubt. Who would want to remove her from a movie?! Plus, there are some cool special effects used with her character — K’s hologram girlfriend, Joi. But she’s a distraction in the long run. And, oddly, several plot points weakly hinge on her character. What would have been more interesting? Have K be a complete loner, like Deckard. Have him fall for a human — the reverse of how Deckard fell for a replicant in the original film.
K thinks he might be the child of the replicant mother, Rachael. Yet, he knows that he's not human… He tells his boss that he wasn’t born, and that his memories are implants. Also, he can check his own eye’s serial number. So, maybe he thinks he's the replicant child of Rachael. Either way, whether human or replicant, K thinking he's Rachael's child seems weak. What seems a stronger motivation for K's actions? See below.
With these two edits, K is more interesting and heroic. He has a different, new motivation for his actions. Now his central conflict is whether to retire the missing child, who is someone he considers to be special. This matches Deckard's conflict in the first BR movie. Deckard was ordered to retire Rachael, but didn't want to, because he considered her to be special.
With these edits, also, now K's self-sacrifice has nothing to do with losing Joi, which seemed weak. And, his relationship with the replicant prostitute now carries more weight.
These edits also went a long way in solving the length problem of the movie. In general, for me, Blade Runner has loads more personality and soul than Blade Runner 2049. Yet, I still wanted to do a fan edit of BR 2049.
Original Running Time: 2:44
Fan Edit Running Time: 1:59
Link to fan edit: here.