‘Blade Runner 2049’ was biggest movie flop in 50 years, according to new study
If reviews on rating sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd and IMDb are anything to go on, Blade Runner 2049 was the biggest flop of the past half-century. The 2017 movie was subject to plenty of anticipation following the success of the 1982 original. However, it proved a failure at the box office.
Blade Runner 2049 was directed by Denis Villeneuve and served as a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The film is set in the titular year’s dystopia and seeks to explore the perils of technological evolution from a modern standpoint, 30 years after the events of the original movie.
With Ryan Gosling joining the cast as a new blade runner, Officer K, for the Los Angeles Police Department, hopes were high among audiences. Despite Scott’s absence from the project, under Villeneuve’s capable watch, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright and Jared Leto seemed primed to make a sequel to remember.
Sadly, the sequel has been forgotten by most as a poorly-timed follow-up to one of the greatest sci-fi movies of the 1980s. Now, according to a study conducted by LuckyDays.com, Blade Runner 2049 has been officially declared the flop of the last half-century.
The site first listed the flop of the year from the past 50 years. Then, the scores across Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, and IMDB were aggregated to determine how each ranked against the others.
Despite its box office disappointment, Blade Runner 2049 was a hit with the critics. With a score of 8/10 on IMDb, 88 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes and five stars on Letterboxd, it was the movie that reaped the most disappointing box office rewards compared to its glowing critical appraisal.
As the best-rated movie of the last 50 years with the most significant inflation-adjusted loss at the box office, LuckyDays.com has deemed Blade Runner 2019 the biggest flop, scoring 83 per cent on the index. Meanwhile, former Monty Python star Terry Gilliam’s 1988 movie The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and the 2022 animation drew in second place with a score of 78 per cent.
With an index score of 77 per cent, the 2020 animation Onward came in at number four with an estimated loss of $153 million. In fifth place is the 2016 film Deepwater Horizon, which explored the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and starred Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell. The movie scored 74 per cent but endured box office losses estimated between $76 million to $143 million.
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