{"id":711682,"date":"2026-07-26T07:58:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T07:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/711682\/"},"modified":"2026-07-26T07:58:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T07:58:17","slug":"the-beautiful-1985-movie-ridley-scott-called-ahead-of-its-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/711682\/","title":{"rendered":"The “beautiful” 1985 movie Ridley Scott called ahead of its time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ridley<\/p>\n

Credit: Far Out \/ YouTube Still<\/p>\n

Sat 25 July 2026 20:15, UK <\/p>\n

No director wants to make a movie that\u2019s ahead of its time, because that usually means that audiences didn\u2019t get it the first time around, which also usually means it flopped. Ridley Scott<\/a> knows what that feels like, and he\u2019s adamant it\u2019s happened to him more than once.<\/p>\n

The first was, obviously, Blade Runner. These days, and for a long time, it\u2019s rightly been held up as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, and it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

However, in the summer of 1982, it flopped. Steven Spielberg\u2019s ET the Extra-Terrestrial had at least a little bit to do with it, since both Scott\u2019s masterpiece and John Carpenter\u2019s The Thing suffered from being darker, dingier, and more adult-skewing<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

According to the Gladiator director, though, he did it twice in a row. Feel free to disagree, and there\u2019s 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\u2019d never make another fantasy movie<\/a> again, and he hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Scott felt exactly the same way, made an almost identical vow<\/a>, and he\u2019s stuck with it as well. Despite that, he doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s 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\u2019s seminal trilogy, that\u2019s one of the reasons he thinks it was ahead of its time.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople said Legend didn\u2019t work,\u201d he growled, and people said that because it quite clearly didn\u2019t. Still, he disagreed. \u201cBut I think it does work. I think it\u2019s 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\u2019ve gone away from that, and I thought, \u2018Damn, I should have made that now.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Further reading: Cutting Room Floor<\/p>\n

He could if he really wanted to, and he wouldn\u2019t be the first filmmaker to remake one of their own works<\/a>, but it\u2019s 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\u2019t make any of it back, and turned its soon-to-be superstar leading man against an entire genre.<\/p>\n

Legend isn\u2019t an awful movie, even if it\u2019s far from great, and Scott has made at least a couple that are demonstrably worse, but there can\u2019t be many viewers who\u2019d watch it today and think to themselves that it was a quarter of a century ahead of the curve.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

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