Released in 2017, Blade Runner 2049 arrived 35 years after Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner and had to walk a very fine line: honouring a beloved classic while carving out its own identity. Denis Villeneuve, with Roger Deakins behind the camera and Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford in front of it, delivered a film that divided the box office but earned huge critical acclaim. The behind the scenes story is packed with fascinating detail, from years of development hell to ground-breaking visual effects and some crazily impressive commitment from its cast and crew. We’re telling that story now with 50 enormous facts about Blade Runner 2049.

We covered Blade Runner 2049 on the All The Right Movies podcast. You can listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the ATRM website.

1. The sequel was stuck in development hell for years

The road to Blade Runner 2049 was anything but straightforward. Back in 1995, author KW Jeter wrote an authorised sequel novel to the original film called Blade Runner 2: Edge of Human, which followed lead character Deckard trying to hunt down a replicant who had learned the secret of long life, in order to prevent his replicant partner Rachael from dying. A screenwriter called Stuart Hazeldine adapted it into a spec screenplay called Blade Runner Down, but the film rights owners, Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio, weren’t interested.

Ridley Scott and Warner Bros. then began discussing a sequel in the 2000s, but licensing disputes over Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the Philip K. Dick novel that the original Blade Runner was based on, stalled progress. Perenchio repeatedly vetoed any sequel talk. Scott developed an idea for a loosely connected follow-up called Metropolis, inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic of the same name, but that stalled too. In 2009, Scott worked with his son Luke and his brother Tony on Purefold, a planned web series of shorts set before the events of the original film, but it fell through due to a lack of funding.

Eventually, Bud Yorkin bought out Perenchio’s share of the film rights and producers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, who owned Alcon Entertainment, then struck a deal with Yorkin for the rights to sequels and television. They approached Ridley Scott, and he signed on to direct in 2011.

2. Scott stepped aside, and an up-and-coming director stepped in

A script was in development and Harrison Ford was interested in returning as Deckard, but Scott eventually dropped out as director due to scheduling clashes with Alien: Covenant (2017). However, he stayed on as Executive Producer to oversee the creative direction.

When Scott left, Alcon knew who they wanted. They’d worked with Denis Villeneuve on the thriller Prisoners (2013) a few years earlier and knew he now had science fiction experience through his first contact flick Arrival (2016). Villeneuve loved Blade Runner but was hesitant at first. He later said he didn’t think a sequel should be made, but didn’t want anyone else to do it either in case they, as he put it, “messed it up.”

3. Villeneuve felt Scott’s presence

Villeneuve said he felt enormous pressure to do the first film justice, and what made it worse was that Ridley Scott was on set all the time during early production. Eventually, Villeneuve asked Scott how he would feel if his favourite director, Ingmar Bergman, was looking over his shoulder while he was trying to direct. Scott said he understood and left the set.

4. The screenwriter’s first reaction was “oh shit, not again”

Hampton Fancher, who had co-written the original Blade Runner, was invited back by Ridley Scott to pen the sequel. According to Scott, Fancher’s response was simply, “Oh shit, not again.” He came around, though, and wrote the story as a 110-page novella. That was then handed to screenwriter Michael Green, who had just worked with Scott on Alien: Covenant, to turn it into a full screenplay. Green later revealed that Fancher’s original draft was called Acid Zoo, and Deckard died at the end. So that was swiftly changed.

5. Several alternative titles were considered

The film went through a number of potential titles. One working title was Queensboro, named after the bridge that producer Andrew Kosove had to cross whenever he met with Fancher. To keep production secret, the crew used the codename Triboro, after another bridge. Androids Dream was suggested at one point, and the title that came closest to being used was Blade Runner: Time to Live, a direct inversion of antagonist Roy Batty’s famous final words in the original.

6. The new characters’ names were carefully chosen

The writers gave the new characters names that tied into the film’s themes. Blind, messianic antagonist Niander Wallace’s name was derived from “Neanderthal,” a species of human that lived alongside Homo sapiens before dying out roughly 40,000 years ago, tying into the idea of replicants living alongside humans. And the name of memory designer Ana Stelline bears a striking resemblance to “anastellin,” a peptide studied for its anti-cancer properties, though there’s no confirmed evidence this was intentional.

7. Real places gave an authentic look

Villeneuve wanted to shoot at real locations and on real sets as much as possible to create a more grounded, tangible world. The solar farms we see at the very start of the film were shot at the Gemasolar thermal power station near Seville in Spain. The scenes on Sapper Morton’s farm were filmed in Iceland. However, the dead tree on the farm where K discovers the buried box that kickstarts the narrative wasn’t real at all: it was made of concrete.

8. One actor had to convince Villeneuve he was the right man (or replicant)

Dave Bautista got the part of farmer/replicant Sapper Morton through a standard casting process, but Villeneuve didn’t initially want him as he thought Bautista was too young for the role. The makeup supervisor, Donald Mowat, had Bautista made up to look older, and his performance in the audition won Villeneuve over. It turned out a great piece of casting: Bautista gives Sapper a quiet dignity.

9. Three shorts bridged the gap

We don’t see it in the film itself, but the events that lead to the opening sequence were explored in a prequel short called 2048: Nowhere to Run. In it, a little girl and her mother are attacked by muggers. Sapper saves them by killing three attackers, revealing himself as a replicant, and that’s how K tracks him down.

In total, the studios produced three short films set between the original Blade Runner and 2049. As well as Nowhere to Run, there was Black Out: 2022, an animation by Shin’ichirō Watanabe (known for 2003’s The Animatrix) that explains the blackout mentioned in the film, where replicant data was destroyed and production was banned. And 2036: Nexus Dawn shows how Niander Wallace brings about the end of the prohibition on replicant manufacturing. Both live-action shorts were directed by Luke Scott, Ridley’s son.

10. The opening was inspired by an original reject

The first scenes of Blade Runner 2049, where K arrives at Sapper’s farmhouse, were inspired by an opening that had been written for the original Blade Runner and rejected by Ridley Scott. In that unused version, Rick Deckard was in a countryside house, waiting to retire a replicant dressed in a protection suit and gas mask while a pot of soup boiled in the kitchen. All of those visual elements found their way into the 2049 version. 35 years earlier, Scott opted for the now-famous noodle bar scene instead, but using that original concept here was a smart way of tapping into the headspace the writers had been in decades earlier.

11. The baseline test went through several versions

To check he’s not drifted away from his programming, K has to pass the baseline exam after each mission. The original screenplay had the test at the very beginning of the film, but Villeneuve moved it to open with the landscape shots instead. The test itself changed too: the first version had K lying on a bed with a machine scanning him, but through the storyboarding process it evolved into the clinical interrogation booth we see in the finished film. The scanner device in the scene was designed by storyboard artist Sam Hudecki.

Two versions of the baseline test were actually filmed. The first was the scene as written in the script. The second, which is the one we see, was written by Ryan Gosling himself and filmed as one continuous eight-minute take. Editor Joe Walker then cut it down to roughly 40 seconds.

12. The baseline dialogue has literary roots

The words K recites during the test, “cells interlinked within cells interlinked,” is taken from Pale Fire, a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Originally, the script had it written as a mantra that K simply recites but Gosling suggested they use an acting technique he knew called “dropping in.” This was a method developed by acting coaches Tina Packer and Kristin Linklater as a way to help actors form an emotional connection to challenging Shakespearean text. That suggestion transformed the scene, giving it the quality of K almost programming himself.

Nabokov’s Pale Fire shows up elsewhere in the film too. We see K reading it in his apartment, and his holographic companion Joi picks it up. Another reference comes when K and Joi go up to K’s apartment roof: there’s a prominent sign reading “Mobius 21,” a nod added by production designer Dennis Gassner to the artist Moebius, whose illustrations had influenced the cyberpunk visual style of the original Blade Runner.

13. The Los Angeles skyline wasn’t Los Angeles

The awe-inspiring cityscape shots we see just before the baseline test, showing K returning to LAPD headquarters, were actually helicopter shots of the favelas and urban areas around Mexico City. As with the original film, miniatures were also used, and everything was enhanced with digital effects in post-production. The VFX studio Framestore, who handled the effects shots in the opening, worked with real landscapes and digitally inserted elements into them rather than relying on pure green screen.

14. One character’s striking appearance is real

The archivist who works in the Wallace Corporation’s records hall and helps K during the investigation is played by Tomas Lemarquis, a French-Icelandic actor who built his career in Icelandic cinema. Lemarquis has alopecia universalis, a condition that left him completely hairless by the age of 14, and he is often cast in roles that make use of his distinctive look. He appeared in X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) as mutant tracker Caliban the year before Blade Runner 2049.

15. Wallace’s lair was modelled on an ancient temple

Production designer Dennis Gassner built the set for Wallace’s headquarters in Budapest. He based the design on one of the rooms in Kiyomizu-dera, a 1,200-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. The floor type used in the design is called a nightingale floor, where the boards are designed to chirp when people walk on them as a way to prevent intruders. It’s a detail that’s both beautiful and functional, particularly because Wallace is blind. The idea was that the clean, minimalist design of Niander’s space stands in stark contrast to the chaos of the world outside, like a palace while the rest of civilisation rots.

16. A pop music legend could have played Wallace

Niander Wallace is played by Jared Leto but when Villeneuve was casting the part, he considered Ed Harris and Gary Oldman before settling on the person he originally wanted: David Bowie. Bowie sadly passed away in January 2016, and Leto was cast in his place. Villeneuve said Leto had the underlying menace he was looking for in Niander and, like Bowie, came from a musical background (Leto has fronted American rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars since 1998).

17. Leto’s costume made him temporarily blind

To fully immerse himself in the fact that Wallace is blind, Jared Leto wore opaque contact lenses that made it impossible for him to see. They were specially hand-painted by one of only two experts in the world capable of doing that kind of work. Leto wore them from the start of each shooting day until he left the set. It’s a detail that ties back to the original film, where the replicant creator Eldon Tyrell had his eyes gouged out by Roy Batty.

18. Wallace’s “angels” are a nod to Roy Batty

There’s a subtle connection to the original film in how Wallace talks about his creations. In Blade Runner, Roy Batty quotes 18th and 19th century English poet William Blake and says, “Fiery the angels fell.” This is a deliberate misquote of a passage from Blake’s 1793 prophetic poem America: A Prophecy, which reads: “Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep.” Also, Wallace refers to his replicants as his “angels,” a neat callback that hints at more than a little God complex on Wallace’s part.

19. K’s home was filled with mist

We first see K’s apartment relatively early in the film, and it’s where we’re introduced to Ana de Armas as Joi. Both the exteriors and interiors of K’s building were shot in Budapest. The apartment set was built on a soundstage and filled with mist to create the dystopian look of fog outside K’s window.

20. Villeneuve told a designer to rein it in

Costume designer Renée April designed some bold futuristic outfits for the film, but Villeneuve told her to pull back. His reasoning was that in a world decimated by the blackout and widespread famine, fashion had become secondary and clothes were purely functional. There are some out-there nods to the original film, though. Joi has a transparent raincoat similar to the one worn by the replicant Zhora in the first movie.

21. The world was summed up in one word

Villeneuve’s regular production designer, Patrice Vermette (who had worked on Arrival), was unavailable for Blade Runner 2049, so Villeneuve hired Dennis Gassner, who had worked with the Coen Brothers and on three James Bond films. Gassner said that when he first met Villeneuve, he asked the director to describe the world they were creating in one word. Villeneuve said: “Brutality.” That philosophy is visible in the brutalist architecture of K’s apartment block, the more angular design of the flying spinner vehicles, and the generally harsher visual world compared to the original.

Gassner and Villeneuve both preferred to avoid green screen wherever possible, so they built as many sets as they could. Ridley Scott suggested Budapest as a shooting location after he had recently filmed The Martian (2015) there, and that’s where the majority of the film was shot. K’s apartment, the Wallace Corporation, and many other key locations were all constructed in Hungarian studios. Budapest’s own brutalist architectural style made it an ideal fit for Villeneuve’s vision.

22. Only one person was seriously considered for K

Hampton Fancher said he was already picturing Ryan Gosling in the lead when he was developing the story. When he told Ridley Scott that Gosling was who he wanted, Scott’s response was simply, “You got it.” When Harrison Ford was told they were thinking of casting Gosling, his reaction was similarly immediate. And when Villeneuve came on board, he agreed to the choice without hesitation. Gosling himself accepted straight away when offered the part. He said he loved the script, but it was the chance to work with Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins (more on him later) that sealed it.

23. Gosling had some nerves about the film

Blade Runner 2049 was the first time Gosling had played the lead in a big blockbuster, and he was initially a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the sets. Villeneuve helped calm him down and Gosling later said of his director: “If you made a list of all the characteristics you hoped for in a director and sent it to Santa Claus, there’d be a Denis Villeneuve under your tree Christmas morning. Maybe a little drunk on eggnog, but he’d be there!”

24. There were no plot leaks on this one

Lennie James, who plays Mr Cotton, the orphanage manager, said the cast had to adhere to very specific rules during production. When an actor or actress was offered a part, they had to accept within 36 hours. The scripts they received were incomplete: cast members mostly only got the pages for scenes their own character was involved in. They received digital copies that were deleted immediately after they finished filming their scenes.

25. Ford and Scott spent a long time agreeing on Deckard’s role

When Ridley Scott first pitched the idea of a sequel to Harrison Ford, they talked at length about what the role would involve until they agreed on a storyline Ford was happy with. Ford then committed to returning as Deckard. His final day on set was to film the final scene in the finished film, and apparently he’d enjoyed his time on the production so much that he became emotional when they wrapped. Some crew members began to cry as well.

26. They made Joi feel real by making her look more artificial

Editor Joe Walker experimented with a technique to make Joi seem more hologram-like. He tried freezing De Armas’ image for nine frames before she responded to a question, so it looked like Joi’s program paused for a split second before answering. Villeneuve ultimately decided against it and had Joi respond naturally instead. The film finds other ways to show her nature, particularly the scene early on in K’s apartment where Joi changes outfits several times in rapid succession.

27. Giant Joi’s voice belongs to a crew member

Later in the film, K walks past an enormous holographic advertisement for Joi. The idea was that this version represented Joi’s default factory setting, and that K had customised her voice and appearance for his own unit. The advertisement version of Joi was voiced by Mary Lukasiewicz, an assistant editor on the film. She was originally just a placeholder, meant to be dubbed by Ana de Armas later, but Villeneuve decided to keep her voiceover. It reinforces the idea that K’s Joi was, ultimately, just programming.

28. The enforcer’s name started as a term of endearment

Wallace’s ruthless henchwoman is replicant Luv. Played by Sylvia Hoeks, Luv was named Fraser in the first drafts of the script, and Wallace would call her “love” as a casual term of endearment. Over the course of rewrites, that shifted until “Luv” became her actual name.

Hoeks said that when Villeneuve was describing Luv’s backstory, he told her the replicant character had been activated 12 years ago. Hoeks used that as the basis for her performance, choosing to give Luv the behaviour of an immature and petulant 12-year-old. That approach explains the tantrums, and the brutally violent moments like Luv crushing K’s boss Lieutenant Joshi’s hand into a glass.

29. The orphanage wasteland was built with clever design

The desolate landscapes surrounding the orphanage were created through a combination of miniature models, a custom-built set, and green screen work by effects studios Framestore and Rodeo FX. Once again, the filming was done in Budapest, with many of the sets only a minute’s walk from one another.

There’s also a nod to another film in the orphanage sequence. David Webb Peoples, who co-wrote the original Blade Runner, also wrote the screenplay for Soldier (1998), a sci-fi/action film starring Kurt Russell. Peoples has said he considered Soldier to be set in the Blade Runner universe, and the design of the big garbage dumpers we see around the orphanage are almost identical to the ones in that film.

30. Emily Blunt was offered a role but had to turn it down

After working with Villeneuve on the action thriller Sicario (2015), English actress Emily Blunt was reportedly offered a part in Blade Runner 2049, but had to decline as she was pregnant at the time. It hasn’t been confirmed which role Blunt was offered, but it would likely have been either Dr. Ana Stelline or Luv.

Incidentally, Carla Juri, who plays Stelline, got the part after auditioning. Because the script was so secretive, she tested for the role by performing a scene from another film exploring artificial intelligence –  Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014).

31. The “threesome” was shot without green screen

One of the most visually striking scenes in the film sees Joi attempt to share a physical moment with K by syncing her holographic form with replicant prostitute Mariette, played by Mackenzie Davis. The scene was shot practically, without green screen and with minimal CGI. Villeneuve didn’t want the women to be perfectly in sync, so they filmed Gosling and Davis first, with Davis given freedom to move as she liked. They then filmed it again with Ana de Armas replacing Davis, with visual effects supervisor John Nelson directing de Armas from behind the camera so Joi is close to mimicking Mariette but not perfectly aligned. Four GoPro cameras in the corners of the room captured every angle, which allowed the team to triangulate how the final composite should look on Roger Deakins’ main camera.

32. The original composer was replaced

The first composer hired for the film was Jóhann Jóhannsson, who had worked with Villeneuve on Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival. But after Jóhannsson started delivering his initial samples, Villeneuve wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to move closer to the sonic world Vangelis had created for the original film, so he approached Hans Zimmer instead. Zimmer was scheduled to go on tour during production, so he brought in Benjamin Wallfisch as his co-writer. The two had already worked together on biographical drama Hidden Figures (2016), and Wallfisch had also contributed to Zimmer’s score for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017).

33. The film’s signature sound started as human voices

The loud, almost mechanical noise that appears throughout the score began as a male choir sample. Benjamin Wallfisch ran it through a series of electronic filters again and again until it sounded mechanical. Human voices made inhuman: it’s essentially the film’s central theme expressed through audio.

34. The sound design is full of hidden references

Sound designer Mark Mangini made some deliberate choices for the film’s soundscape. The Wallace Corporation’s alert sound is taken from Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 composition Peter and the Wolf. And the sound of the spinners (the film’s flying vehicles) was derived from a bullroarer, a musical instrument used by indigenous Australian cultures, swung above the head to produce a distinctive humming sound. Mangini said he uses “visual metaphor to find sonic metaphors,” and utilising the spinning bullroarer for the spinner vehicle is a good example of that approach.

Villeneuve liked the sound of the spinner but told Mangini it needed to sound old and worn. So Mangini recorded the sound of his wife’s car’s Honda engine and incorporated that into the spinner’s audio. He then manipulated that recording to create different versions for different contexts: the spinner flying past camera, the spinner when we’re inside it with K, and so on.

35. The entire film was storyboarded in a hotel

Roger Deakins, the legendary Director of Photography behind The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Skyfall (2012), and many others, had just worked with Villeneuve on Prisoners and Sicario. Villeneuve said that after he accepted the directing job, he was having dinner with Deakins that same night. The two of them holed up in a Montreal hotel for a month with storyboard artists Sam Hudecki and Darryl Henley to visually map out the entire film. Villeneuve said some of the ideas they came up with were so ambitious that the screenplay had to be rewritten afterwards to accommodate them.

36. Deakins helped create Giant Joi

The cinematographer had a direct hand in designing the enormous pink hologram of Joi that K encounters towards the end of the film. Makeup department head Donald Mowat said Villeneuve’s brief for the sequence was simply, “I want her to be pink.” Mowat spoke to Deakins, who clarified: “He means bubblegum pink. Do that and you’ll be fine.” The resulting shot of Joi towering above K would become one of the defining images of the film. And the blue, Sphinx-like hairstyle Joi wears was just a cheap wig, as Mowat didn’t have time to source anything else.

37. A classic image from the original was brought back

One of the original Blade Runner’s most recognisable visual elements is the neon corporate advertising that fills the skyline. 2049 carried that tradition forward, and even brought back brands that no longer exist in the real world. Pan Am and Atari, both of which showed up in the 1982 movie but haven’t operated properly since the 1990s, appear in the film. Ryan Gosling said in an interview that Villeneuve told him this is a world where Apple never existed, so technology focuses on function rather than aesthetics.

38. Las Vegas was inspired by a real event

When K travels to the ruins of Las Vegas, the screen is drenched in a thick orange haze, signifying that the area is saturated with radiation. The look was inspired by photographs of a 2009 sandstorm in Sydney, Australia. Roger Deakins showed the images to Villeneuve, who immediately approved that look The effect was achieved through on-set lighting and atmospheric effects like mist and haze, with Framestore adding digital colour grading in post-production.

39. A legendary concept artist returned

When planning the Las Vegas scenes, Villeneuve brought in Syd Mead, who had worked as a concept artist on the original Blade Runner and was responsible for much of that film’s iconic visual design work. Villeneuve asked Mead to design how Las Vegas would look in the Blade Runner universe, and the production based it mostly on his concepts. It turned out to be Syd Mead’s last film. Not a bad way to go, connecting the dots back to probably his most famous work.

40. Deckard’s first line is a literary quote

When K finally encounters Deckard in the abandoned casino, Harrison Ford’s first line is: “You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you now, would you boy?” It’s a quote from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, spoken by the character Ben Gunn, a sailor who has been marooned on the island for years. There was a deleted scene from the original Blade Runner where a character was seen reading Treasure Island, making the reference a double callback.

41. Deckard’s wooden carvings spell out a name

The production is full of small details that reward close attention. In Deckard’s hideout, he has carved several wooden animals: a rhino, an antelope, a cat, a horse, an elephant, and a lion. The first letter of each spells out “Rachel.” Elsewhere, when K visits Gaff (the origami‑making police officer from the original, played by Edward James Olmos), the character has made an origami sheep, a nod to Philip K. Dick’s source novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And when K walks into the hall where Deckard appears, we hear the same bell sounds as when Deckard walks through the Bradbury Building for the final showdown with Pris and Roy Batty in the first film.

42. The Vegas holograms nearly derailed the scene

The casino K enters is called the “Vintage Casino,” and the Frank Sinatra hologram we see was a nod to producer Cynthia Yorkin, whose husband Bud Yorkin had directed Sinatra in a film called Come Blow Your Horn (1963). Both Sinatra and Elvis Presley held famous Las Vegas residencies at different points in their careers, which is why they appear alongside Marilyn Monroe as ghostly holograms.

The holograms weren’t real archive footage. They were shot specifically for the film using models, with the likenesses of the three stars digitally composited on top of the models. Villeneuve said getting the holograms to work convincingly became so difficult that they considered changing the scene altogether. Editor Joe Walker saved the day by suggesting the holograms cut in and out like a glitching signal, which Villeneuve said completely transformed the scene’s tone.

43. Harrison Ford punched Ryan Gosling in the face

During the fight between K and Deckard in the casino, Ford accidentally punched Gosling for real, and the take made it into the finished film. As an apology, Ford invited Gosling to share a bottle of whisky with him and, for good measure, mooned him. Apparently Ford had done the same thing to Sean Young (who played Rachael) on the set of the original after being overly aggressive with her in one scene. Ford later explained the mishap by saying Gosling “dances forwards a lot more than he dances backwards.”

44. The digital Rachael was some undertaking

One of the film’s most talked-about sequences sees a digital recreation of Rachael. The effect was created by VFX studio MPC, and Villeneuve told them they had to produce the best CGI recreation of a character ever seen. MPC scanned Sean Young’s current bone structure to create a digital skull, then laid skin on top using footage of Young from 1982 as reference.

When they were done, they created a digital version of a specific image from the original film: a famous shot of Rachael smoking in close-up. They showed the original and their recreation to Villeneuve side by side, and when he couldn’t pick out which was real, they knew they were on the right track.

An actress called Loren Peta was hired to physically perform the scene when Rachael interacts with Deckard, and Sean Young came in to coach Peta on her mannerisms and teach her how to walk like Rachael. Peta was filmed in the scene, and Young’s face was then digitally composited on top. Early attempts didn’t look right, and the team couldn’t figure out why, until producer Karen Murphy identified the problem: it wasn’t the skull or the skin that was off, it was the makeup. Once they matched it to how Sean Young was actually made up in 1982, it clicked. To maintain secrecy, the studio denied at the time that Young was involved. She got in on the act too, releasing a statement urging fans to boycott the film because she wasn’t in it.

45. A budget-saving decision started a trend

The plan was to film the climactic water-based sequences at the Malta Film Studios, known for its enormous water tanks where big productions like Clash of the Titans (2010) and Game of Thrones had shot. But producer Cynthia Yorkin calculated that relocating all 230 crew members would cost a fortune and realised they could save roughly $1 million by building their own tank in Budapest instead. Since then, Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), Dune (2021), and The Witcher have all used those same Budapest water tanks.

46. The finale was created word-of-mouth

To stop the ending from being leaked, it was communicated to the cast verbally and not included in the scripts. And in the film’s final moments, as K lies dying on the steps of the Stelline laboratory while snow falls around him, Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch weave the score from the original movie’s “Tears in Rain” speech into the background. It’s a subtle and moving touch that connects K’s death to Roy Batty’s years earlier.

47. The film was a box office bomb

From a production budget of $150 – 185 million, Blade Runner 2049 grossed $276.6 million worldwide, making it a significant commercial disappointment. Once marketing costs – which can typically add 50–100% on top of the production budget – are factored in, the film needed roughly $350 million to break even. It fell about $80 million short.

The film fared better at the Oscars, though. It was nominated for five awards and won two: Roger Deakins finally took home the Best Cinematography statue after 14 nominations, and John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert and Richard R. Hoover won for Best Visual Effects.

48. Critics and audiences agree on the film, even if they didn’t show up

Today, Blade Runner 2049 has an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from both critics and audiences, perfectly balanced, and on IMDb, it holds a very solid 8.0 out of 10. Ridley Scott said the slow pacing of the film was the reason it underperformed and suggested it was at least 30 minutes too long. Villeneuve said he was proud of the film, but acknowledged he had made “the most expensive art house movie in cinema history” and always knew it was a financial risk.

49. One country received a censored version (and wasn’t happy about it)

Sony Pictures handled worldwide distribution and gave a censored version of the film to Turkey, with all scenes of nudity removed. Sony said it was done out of respect for Turkish culture, but Turkey was not impressed. The S.I.Y.A.D, the association of Turkish film critics, wrote an open letter to Sony stating: “Seeing oneself as an authority to decide what is appropriate and what is not appropriate for a ‘local culture’ and imposing your view on that ‘culture’ is one of the greatest shows of disrespect for that ‘culture’.”

50. There’s only one cut, but Villeneuve isn’t done yet

The original Blade Runner is famous for having seven different cuts released over the years, but Villeneuve has said the theatrical version of 2049 is the only version of his film. At one point, there was a four-hour rough cut, and they considered releasing it as two separate movies, but Villeneuve decided he wanted one definitive version.

That said, he hasn’t ruled out returning to the world of replicants. In an interview with Empire Magazine, Villeneuve said: “If you ask me if I’d like to revisit this universe in a different way, I can say yes. It would need to be a project on its own. Something disconnected from both other movies.” He’s also said he wakes up at night dreaming about a detective noir story set in the future, so watch this space.

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