What Different Versions Of The Film Blade Runner Exist?
Warner Brothers were not happy with the original version of the film as presented to them by the director, Ridley Scott. They felt that it was too complicated for the audience to follow and, overall, too sombre in tone to have mass appeal. They pressed Scott to make changes to remedy these perceived problems. Somewhat reluctantly, he strove to accommodate their concerns by adding some voice-over first person narration from the main character, Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and by tacking on a happy ending. Rather than shoot extra footage for the new ending, it was simply borrowed from Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining. This was the version of the film that was released to the public. It was not a great success commercially and years later Scott edited another version of the film, now known as the Director’s Cut, taking out the happy ending and the voice-over and adding a few scenes to flesh out Deckard’s character a bit more.
