Ridley Scott's 164-Minute Sci-Fi Masterpiece Officially Lands on a New Streamer

Some sci-fi movies flop because they just don't hit audiences properly, perhaps because they go in to see one film and end up seeing a miserable Ryan Gosling wandering around a dreadful, dusty-yet-neon-soaked dystopia for almost three hours. This one made $259 million, lost money anyway, and then spent the next nine years being called one of the best science-fiction movies of the century. Funny how that works.

Blade Runner 2049, the sci-fi epic from Denis Villeneuve and producer Ridley Scott, has officially found a new streaming home on Prime Video. The sequel to Scott's 1982 classic arrives almost a decade after its theatrical release, and its reputation is far stronger than the box office returns it collected would have suggested.

Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what's left of society into chaos. K's discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.

Gosling (Drive) stars as K alongside Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones) as Deckard, Ana de Armas (Knives Out) as Joi, Sylvia Hoeks (See) as Luv, Robin Wright (House of Cards) as Lieutenant Joshi, Mackenzie Davis (Terminator: Dark Fate) as Mariette, Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) as Sapper Morton, and Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) as Niander Wallace.

How Good Is 'Blade Runner 2049?

Very. Blade Runner 2049 holds an 88% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, and Villeneuve somehow managed to make a sequel to one of the most respected sci-fi movies ever without embarrassing himself, which was hardly guaranteed. The box office was the problem. Blade Runner 2049 cost somewhere around $150 million before marketing and finished with roughly $259 million worldwide. Scott, never a man to miss a chance to fail to mince his words, offered a fairly simple explanation for why it struggled: “It's slow. It's long. Too long.”

He wasn't wrong about the runtime — the movie lasts 164 minutes — but that's also part of what makes it work. Villeneuve gives the world room to breathe, while cinematographer Roger Deakins finally won his first Academy Award after 13 previous nominations.

Blade Runner 2049 is streaming now on Prime Video.