It’s always strange when the title of a movie or series doesn’t necessarily match its story, but fewer cases are as puzzling as Blade Runner. The movie adapts a Philip K. Dick novel with a completely different title itself, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and there isn’t any mention throughout Rick Deckard’s (Harrison Ford) misadventures of why his job is referred to as a blade runner, neither in the movie nor the novel. Decades later, Blade Runner 2049 came out and once again this question went unanswered, and you can bet that, when Blade Runner 2099 arrives, it will remain that way.
There actually is a story behind how director Ridley Scott and writer Hampton Fancher arrived at this title, though. As it turns out, the term “blade runner” had already been floating around for a few years before the movie started development, and it didn’t have anything at all to do with the premise of Scott and Fancher’s movie. Instead, it had to do with actual blades and people running with them. That didn’t stop them from choosing it anyway, but the whole story is nearly as interesting as Blade Runner itself.
The Term ‘Blade Runner’ Comes From an Unrelated Sci-Fi Story From 1974
Before Blade Runner, there was The Bladerunner — definite article, no space. That’s the title of a 1974 novel by Alan E. Nourse, a doctor who also wrote quite a few sci-fi novels, and his stories often mixed both these aspects. That’s what happens in The Bladerunner, a dystopia where health care is universal, but those who seek it must undergo sterilization due to newly established eugenics laws. This created a shadow market for medicine, and the protagonist, Billy Gimp, is a “bladerunner” — a smuggler who specializes in medical tools.
The Bladerunner never found much success, but it eventually caught the eye of Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs, who was at a transition moment in his career. In 1976, he decided to write a film treatment for it, but he twisted the story so much, it ended up nearly unrecognizable. After many unsuccessful attempts to get his script produced, Burroughs eventually gave up and decided to adapt this new version of the story to release it as a novel, which he confusingly named Blade Runner (a movie).
Burroughs’ version did eventually become a movie, 1983’s Taking Tiger Mountain. It was one of the late Bill Paxton‘s earliest roles, and director Tom Huckabee bought the rights to Burroughs’ story for 100 dollars, noting that “he was giving away stories to any film student or amateur that wrote him a letter.” It was Burroughs’ only film credit and became a niche classic, but, again, completely unrelated to the 1982 classic Blade Runner, which came out a year earlier and used only the name.
Hampton Fancher Used Burroughs’ Book To Come up With a Title for His Movie With Ridley Scott
In Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the term “blade runner” simply does not exist. Rick Deckard is simply a police detective who specializes in hunting and retiring androids (who are also not called “replicants”). After a few months of working on the script, Ridley Scott asked Hampton Fancher what Deckard’s job should be called, “a question that was so obvious I hadn’t really addressed it before,” Fancher told Vulture in 2017. “I didn’t have an answer, but I’d better get one fast.”
As Facher recalls, that same night he found Burroughs’ novel in his library, and that was it. “I was looking through my books and came across a thin little volume by William Burroughs called Blade Runner. Bingo!” That’s how Deckard became a blade runner, but there was still the issue of what the movie was going to be named, since the original novel’s title simply didn’t work for a movie. They had thought about Android or Dangerous Days, but those titles didn’t have the edge the story itself had. According to Fancher, “Michael Deeley, the producer, said, ‘It’s staring us right in the face,’” and that’s how the movie also became Blade Runner.
To solve the issue of rights over the term “blade runner,” they approached William S. Burroughs and paid him “a nominal fee,” thus securing the perfect title for their movie. Perhaps if they had waited just a little longer, they wouldn’t have been able to. That’s because Blade Runner was developed between the late 1970s and early 1980s, coming out in June 1982. Taking Tiger Mountain came out shortly after, in 1983, but had Tom Huckabee approached Burroughs before, maybe the Blade Runner title would have come with the rights for the novel, and now, we would all be living in a very different world.
There Are No In-Universe Explanations of What “Blade Runner” Means
In Blade Runner, the title is also the name of the detectives who hunt and retire replicants, making Rick Deckard a blade runner. However, the reason why this particular division has that name is never given in-universe. In some cuts of the film, Gaff (Edward James Olmos) refers to Deckard as “the blade runner,” but, besides that, the title itself is barely even mentioned, too, and, apparently, that’s on purpose. “I think ‘explanations’ are the bug-bears of screenplay writing and I like to stay clear of them,” Hampton Fancher said in 2017.
The movie doesn’t owe anyone explanations, but this meant that what “blade runner” means ended up falling into the realm of headcanon. Yours truly, for example, first imagined that the only way of being sure someone is a replicant was to open them up with a blade (which admittedly isn’t a very cool thought). The 1982 comic book adaptation did include a narration of Deckard thinking: “Blade runner. You’re always movin’ on the edge,” but that’s almost like his own explanation for something he isn’t sure of himself. But at least now we know what a bladerunner was originally intended to be.
Blade Runner is available for rent on Amazon Prime.
