Just saying that for all the cheese, the vapid exploitation of a children's book, the Harry Potter franchise has had an impact on the kind of films produced. It's opened the doors to numerous wizardy movies, and other fantasy titles.
Whether it'll last as a long term influence I can't say of course.
Blade Runner on the other hand has had the benefit of time, and it's undeniably massively influential. I think you could argue Blade Runner has been influenced by what's gone before like Metropolis.

But yeah it's late.

I just wish the Harry Potter films had more continuity. The set's and locations changed from film to film. Very annoying.

The whole tone of the films has changed, and rather than an organic change, it's a piecemeal mess. I've seen them all, I just like Dumbledore, Hagrid and Snape.

I've corrected that for you

Yep, I agree. Then again, Blade Runner was never created to be those things, Star Wars was so it's always going to win on those criteria with little contest.
Blade Runner was never aimed at children like Star Wars.

I'm a Blade Runner fan. I make no secret of this fact. I'm well in to three figures for the amount of times I've seen it.
I see very little point in comparing it to films such as Star Wars, so I'll leave that point alone.
"Bigger" in terms of what?
Okay, so the film didn't do stellar business at the box office. Is that your criteria for big?
It doesn't have the merchandising of other more child friendly film franchises, then again Blade Runner isn't a film franchise. There's only one film (okay, there's several versions of that film, but that's only a fairly recent occurrence).
So if merchandise is your criteria for 'better' there's few films to compare it to, sadly.

Inception is never going to have as long a reach as Blade Runner has, in my opinion.
Yeah, it's an okay film, with an engaging enough story, but it does nothing that other films haven't done. It's a fake, make-believe reality world that exists in dreams.
Blade Runner has the whole real-world environment as another character in the film. It can't be altered at will. You have to work with it, not alter it when you are inconvenienced by some aspect of it.
There's very little realism to the environment of Inception because it's not real.
The Matrix handled this element of it's story so much better than Inception.

I, and a lot of people I know, will disagree with you on that, but you stated that it's your opinion, and I'm not going to personally attack you for viewing it differently to me.

Blade Runner, like so many other films, is a flawed masterpiece. Clearly Ridley Scott thought so too or he wouldn't have wanted to go back and fix some of what was wrong with it in the first place. (8+)

Do I honestly think it's the greatest film ever made? Well, no, not really. Then again I couldn't possibly say which one is. *shrug*

Mark

Nice post. What I meant by "big" (and I did use the speech marks for a reason) was more mainstream acknowledgement and more viewers AND fans.

I respect your opinion on the movie, but I don't share it. That's not the issue though. My point is that I believe there is a scale on which Star Wars represents one extreme of accessibility and cultural impact (and I've compared it to Shakespeare before) and let's say for argument sake (and because my knowledge is limited) that THX 1138 is the other end of that spectrum.

On that Spectrum, Blade Runner would be somewhere in the middle and if you decided to calibrate that spectrum and populate each step with other movies, we could discuss where exactly between the other two, Blade Runner sits. Might be an interesting conversation for some, and not for others. Jus' sayin'. Is that spectrum in any way related to how "good" a film is? Is accessibility/success/viewership correlated to, or inversely proportional to the "quality/greatness" of a film? I don't know. Perhaps another interesting topic there.

My point is, far more people have seen Star Wars than Blade Runner, far more people have understood Star Wars (on many different levels) than Blade Runner (on any level), and to pick just ONE aspect of Star Wars, the story of Luke from the scene setting to binary sunset and towards his relationship with okenobi has been paralleled and riffed on in tons of subsequent movies. In other words, Star Wars has been more influential than Blade Runner.

Does that make it better? Am I rambling? Not sure. Discuss.... (if you want)

p.s. Prof, I agree. I happen to have a lot of time for Potter due to awesome performances of the adults involved and the pioneering way it has handled the genre as you say.