Blade Runner tallied $14.8 million.)
That would have likely been the end of the story, if not for a fluke occurrence in 1990. That’s when a Los Angeles repertory theater requested a print of
Blade Runner from Warner Bros. and got something unexpected, as Gizmodo reports.
An exhaustive report in the
Los Angeles Times, written by noted film critic Kenneth Turan in 1992, detailed how the Cineplex Odeon Fairfax asked for and received a 70mm print of the sci-fi film. Michael Arick, the director of asset management for Warner Bros., handed over what he thought was the theatrical cut of the movie, which he had grabbed after noticing it had been abandoned in a screening room. Arick never actually rolled the film, so he had no reason to believe it was anything other than the 1982 version audiences saw in theaters.