Blade Runner Took Place This Month

As of today, Ridley Scott's 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner no longer exists in some theoretical future, but rather in an alternate present. A title card in the film identifies the time in which it happens as "November 2019," which in the '80s likely seemed like enough of a wait to give the film some benefit of the doubt in terms of its predictions about technology and the future. They could never have guessed that it would become a cinematic classic that new audiences would still be discovering for the first time 37 years later, and breaking down that ending for decades to come.

It's also a film that has not only had an official sequel, but there was a TV series set in the world of the novella it's based on -- and none of that takes into account the wide-ranging impact that Blade Runner itself has had on American cinema and popular culture.

A lot of the things that were "predicted" in the film, from AI and a massive increase in corporate power and presence in everyday lives, have come true -- although by 1982 those things were already well on the way to being a part of American life, so it's easy enough to downplay the significance of saying they saw it coming.

The film centers on Deckard, a cop who is caught up in a drama around a beautiful woman who is marked for death by the law. She is a replicant -- essentially a clone, but a little more complicated than that -- and the film raises some questions about whether Deckard is, too. A lot of the questions raised by the film were left up in the air, never to be answered, in spite of a botched theatrical release that eventually resulted in several different cuts of the movie being made available for home video.

The film may be a classic, but it bombed at the box office -- a tradition its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049 upheld. Fans mostly loved it, and Harrison Ford returned to the world of the movie, but some were still a little wary of the idea that it would have answered so many of the quesitons left behind by Scott's movie. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve did a fairly good job of leaving some mysteries of his own behind, but it seems like it might be another thirty years before Warner Bros. takes another chance on the movie franchise.

Which...y'know...it could be fun to do a sequel to Blade Runner 2049 actually IN 2049, right? That could work.

Whatever the case, our memories of a pre-Blade Runner world are now lost -- like tears in rain.