By This was hardly the news I expected this early in the morning. Ridley Scott has just announced that he will be directing a “new installment” of his classic science fiction/neo-noir film Blade Runner (read Tom’s Losing My Virginity article on it here). That’s literally all the information we have at the moment. There’s no telling if this is going to be a prequel or a sequel or a remake or just another story in the world of Blade Runner or even something a little closer to the film’s source material, the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? All that’s know is that Ridley Scott is making another Blade Runner movie in some way, shape, or form.
I love Ridley Scott, and Blade Runner would be a good contender for the best science fiction movie ever made, in my mind. But…really? Really? In what world is another Blade Runner necessary? A prequel about Deckard, or even the other Nexus 6 replicants, is silly. A movie showing the creation of replicants in general is silly, and a bit too much like what we’re hearing Prometheus is about. A sequel following Deckard and Rachel is stupid. Another story set in the same world was done as well as you could do by the Blade Runner video game, and even that was almost basically the same story as the movie. About the only thing I could be excited about is if Scott was making something closer to the head-trip of the original novel, mostly to see if that thing is even possible to put on screen. Basically, Geoff said it best in our staff email about this story: “I’m gonna go on a VERY premature limb and predict Duncan Jones’ homage to Blade Runner will be better than Ridley Scott’s re-intepretation/remake/reboot/prequel/sequel of Blade Runner.” Honestly, I’d agree. Or, for all we know, Scott will start making the movie and shouting at the hills that no, it’s not a Blade Runner prequel. It’s just got Blade Runner‘s DNA. But we’ll all know, and we’ll judge him.
Let the speculation begin! What do you guys think is going to come out of this announcement? In what way will we see Blade Runner return to theaters?
UPDATE: The LA Times spoke with the film’s producer, Andrew Kosove, on the film. It likely won’t show up until at least 2014, and Harrison Ford will likely not be involved (thank GOD), though if the film featured Deckard, he’d have to be recast in a prequel, and he probably wouldn’t be alive long enough to be in a sequel. Read their interview with Kosove for more on the long road to making the new Blade Runner a reality.
[Via Deadline]