The Blade Runner curse

[AArdvark]

I had never heard of this berfore


Blade Runner curse

Among the folklore that has developed around the film over the years has been the belief that the film was a curse to the companies whose logos were displayed prominently as product placements in some scenes.[111] While they were market leaders at the time, more than half experienced disastrous setbacks during the next decade. RCA, which at one time was the United States' leading consumer electronics and communications conglomerate, was bought out by one-time parent General Electric in 1985, and dismantled. Atari, which dominated the home video game market when the film came out, never recovered from the next year's downturn in the industry, and by the 1990s had ceased to represent anything more than a brand, a back catalog of games and some legacy computers. Atari today is an entirely different firm, using the former company's name. Cuisinart similarly went bankrupt in 1989, though it lives on under new ownership. The Bell System monopoly was broken up that same year, and most of the resulting Regional Bell operating companies have since changed their names and merged back with each other and other companies to form the new AT&T. Pan Am suffered from the terrorist bombing/destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 and after a decade of mounting losses, finally went bankrupt in 1991 with the falloff in overseas travel caused by the Gulf War. The Coca-Cola Company suffered losses during its failed introduction of New Coke in 1985, but soon afterward regained its market share.[112

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That's a watered-down version of the 2001 curse, which continues unabated today (and which includes several of the companies you mentioned, way before Blade Runner foresaw their demise.)