The “beautiful” 1985 movie Ridley Scott called ahead of its time: “I made it 25 years too soon”
No director wants to make a movie that’s ahead of its time, because that usually means that audiences didn’t get it the first time around, which also usually means it flopped. Ridley Scott knows what that feels like, and he’s adamant it’s happened to him more than once.
The first was, obviously, Blade Runner. These days, and for a long time, it’s rightly been held up as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, and it’s become one of the most influential, too, with almost every neon-soaked dystopia committed to the silver screen in the last four decades owing a debt of gratitude.
However, in the summer of 1982, it flopped. Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial had at least a little bit to do with it, since both Scott’s masterpiece and John Carpenter’s The Thing suffered from being darker, dingier, and more adult-skewing sci-fi flicks at the same time the ball sack-looking alien was on his way to headlining the highest-grossing release in cinema history.
According to the Gladiator director, though, he did it twice in a row. Feel free to disagree, and there’s at least one A-list backer in your corner already. After making Legend in 1985, Tom Cruise was left so dejected and miserable that he swore he’d never make another fantasy movie again, and he hasn’t.
Scott felt exactly the same way, made an almost identical vow, and he’s stuck with it as well. Despite that, he doesn’t think it’s all bad, even if the visually dazzling would-be epic fell on its face at the box office and suffered the misfortune of having its entire set burn down when a fire broke out at Pinewood Studios.
It wasn’t until The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone arrived in 2001 that hard fantasy returned to mainstream prominence as a genre capable of reaping critical, commercial, and awards season rewards, and while Legend is nowhere near being even half as good as Peter Jackson’s seminal trilogy, that’s one of the reasons he thinks it was ahead of its time.
“People said Legend didn’t work,” he growled, and people said that because it quite clearly didn’t. Still, he disagreed. “But I think it does work. I think it’s kind of beautiful and spectacular. I just made it 25 years too soon. Now, all these films which go under the banner of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are like Legend. I’ve gone away from that, and I thought, ‘Damn, I should have made that now.'”
He could if he really wanted to, and he wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to remake one of their own works, but it’s unlikely a studio would give him the budget to give Legend a 21st-century update when the original cost a fair bit of money, didn’t make any of it back, and turned its soon-to-be superstar leading man against an entire genre.
Legend isn’t an awful movie, even if it’s far from great, and Scott has made at least a couple that are demonstrably worse, but there can’t be many viewers who’d watch it today and think to themselves that it was a quarter of a century ahead of the curve.
