Ridley Scott is having recurring dreams of electric sheep. Movie sites this morning are rippling in various states of trepidation, frenzy and apoplexy over news that Ridley Scott is ready to return to the world he created for one of the most influential SF films in history. Deadline bills the story as an exclusive, so I’ll simply clone it here:
EXCLUSIVE: After revisiting his classic Alien with the upcoming 3D Fox film Prometheus, Ridley Scott is committing to direct and produce a film that advances his other seminal and groundbreaking science fiction film. Scott has signed on to direct and produce a new installment of Blade Runner. He’ll make the film with Alcon Entertainment, producing with Alcon partners Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove. This would be the most high profile project for Alcon since The Blind Side.
I’m not getting a clear sense at this point whether Scott intends to do a sequel or a prequel to the 1982 film that was loosely based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Also unclear is whether they start fresh or reach out to Harrison Ford, who starred that took place in dystopian Los Angeles in 2019, in which organic superhuman robots called replicants escaped and are hiding somewhere on earth. Ford played Richard Deckard, a burnt out blade runner assigned to hunt them down. His tired life gets altered when he himself falls for one of the replicants and struggles to keep her from being destroyed.
Hard to figure how this can be a prequel since we’re now living in a time frame only 7 years in advance of the original film. Also difficult for me to imagine Harrison Ford making much more than a cameo appearance unless there’s some new WETA Workshop technology to upgrade his weakened phone-it-in attitude to a 4G network of some sort.
Seems to me most of this news is pure speculation. Your guess is as good as mine or anyone else’s, so what direction would you like to see this project take?