In an interview with IGN, Harrison Ford has confirmed that he and Ridley Scott have been in preliminary talks around an as-of-yet unnamed sequel to Blade Runner, a much anticipated follow up to the 80’s cult-classic. Ford, who has been a household name since George Lucas’s wildly popular Star Wars films, originally played the lead in Blade Runner as Rick Deckard, jaded hunter of an fugitive androids known as replicants in the gritty and high-tech future of the movie.
Given that the book the original film was based off of, Phillip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?“, has several sequels with the second happening only months after the first, it is unclear whether or not this sequel will have Ford reprising his role. Further, the official silence and thus rumor surrounding the sequel make it difficult to conclude what this interview could mean.
Ford revealed that he had Ridley had been “chatting about it” when asked whether or not he would reprise his role, but when pressed about his sometimes acrimonious relationship to the first Blade Runner, he responded, “Everybody has an ambition when they come into a film and that everyone’s ambition may not be so focused on the same thing. I truly admire Ridley as a man and as a director and I would be very happy to engage again with him [in] the further telling of this story.”
A script for the project is currently being written by Michael Green, who wrote the screenplay for 2011’s Green Lantern along with scripts for TV series like Heroes, Everwood, and Smallville, along withHampton Fancher, the writer of the screenplay for the original Blade Runner. Previous details to emerge are that this sequel will probably take place years after the original and feature a female protagonist, although nothing will be certain until the screenplay is finished.
Scott, who will follow upcoming film The Counselor debuts will religious drama Exodus and potentially a Prometheus sequel on his plate before he starts work on the Blade Runner sequel, has confirmed none-the-less that the sequel will be coming up in the future: “It is happening.” About his talks with Ford, he remarked, “With Harrison Ford? I don’t know yet. Is he too old? Well, he was a ‘Nexus-6’ so we don’t know how long he can live.” Given Scott and Ford’s production schedules and the dearth of much more information regarding Ford’s likelihood of being cast, or any of the other potential casting decisions for that matter, the rumor mill will no doubt keep turning for a while to come before more tangible information about this production is released.
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