Ridley Scott succinctly explained the reason for Blade Runner 2049’s box office failure in an interview with the Al Arabiya television network for his new movie All the Money in the World. “It’s slow. It’s slow. Long. Too long. I would have taken out half an hour,” Scott said.
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049’s running time is two hours 44 minutes. Scott’s original movie, made in 1982, clocks one hour and 57 minutes.
Despite emerging as a critical darling and earning rave reviews for its direction, performances and cinematography (by Roger Deakins), Blade Runner 2049 was a failure like its predecessor. Both films are set in futures in which the line between humans and humanoid robots has blurred. Scott was one of the producers on the sequel, which stars Ryan Gosling, Jared Leto and Ana de Armas.
Scott took some of the blame for the movie’s failure in an another interview with the website Vulture. “I sit with writers for an inordinate amount of time and I will not take credit, because it means I’ve got to sit there with a tape recorder while we talk,” he said. “I can’t do that to a good writer. But I have to, because to prove I’m part of the actual process, I have to then have an endless amount [of proof], and I can’t be bothered.” Among the ideas in the sequel that were his were the digital girlfriend who keeps Gosling’s replicant company. Scott described her as “an evolution” from Daryl Hannah’s Pris in the 1982 production.