41 Years Later, Tom Selleck’s Vintage Sci-fi Action Is Enjoying a Shock Revival
Blue Bloods fans miss seeing Tom Selleck as a cop, and with their favorite procedural now canceled with little to no hopes of ever returning, they’re turning elsewhere for their dose of the veteran TV star. Selleck has brought to life a handful of law-enforcement figures over the decades, but one that has been long buried in the pop-culture attic is suddenly experiencing a surprising resurgence on PVOD, more than forty years later. At the height of his Magnum, P.I. fame, Selleck carried some of that same gallant charm to the big screen in the 1984 sci-fi action thriller Runaway. Written and directed by bestselling author Michael Crichton, the film imagined a near-future where malfunctioning household robots (called the runaways) had become a public safety threat, introducing a special police division designed to “run down” the dangerous machines. Selleck leads the investigation as Sergeant Jack R. Ramsay, a veteran whose past trauma left him with a fear of heights.
The movie was a high-concept project packed with early tech speculation, from heat-seeking bullets to spider-like killer robots, and featured the iconic rocker Gene Simmons as the memorably cold, soft-spoken villain, Luther. With heavyweight talent behind it, Runaway seemed poised to be a major draw, but unfortunately, it collapsed under the shadow of an even more grandiose project in James Cameron’s The Terminator. Released during the same period, fans favored the Arnold Schwarzenegger-led project more, leaving Runaway to tank and unable to recoup its $8 million production budget. Critics weren’t kind either, and audiences were equally unimpressed, reflected in their 48% and 33% scores, respectively. However, years later, Runaway has staged a surprising comeback as it recently shot to number one on the iTunes charts, becoming the most in-demand title among viewers in the UK and Ireland for several days now
