This is one of those stories where we update on a rumour that seemed so tenuous that we didn't bother to report it in the first place. But if you saw reports last weekend that Harrison Ford was in talks to return as Deckard, you can now safely ignore them. Production company Alcon Entertainment has flat-out told Deadline that, whatever Ridley Scott's new Blade Runner turns out to be, Harrison Ford almost certainly won't be in it.
Scott had already said this pretty categorically several months ago, and given Ford's well-known antipathy for the film (he didn't come to love it like the rest of the world), the possibility of the actor's involvement always seemed remote at best. But Alcon's Andrew Kosove reiterates that with a fairly strident, "It is absolutely patently false that there has been any discussion about Harrison Ford being in Blade Runner*." *
"What we are trying to do with Ridley now is go through the painstaking process of trying to break the back of the story, figure out the direction we’re going to take the movie and find a writer to work on it," he explains. "The casting of the movie could not be further from our minds at this moment. It's like asking if we're going to make the sky red or blue. There has been no discussion about it."
Kosove was also keen to stress that, as most have surmised, Scott is not planning anything like a conventional sequel to his 1982 classic. "What Ridley's doing in Prometheus is a good template for what we’re trying to do," Kosove says. "He created something that has some association to the original Alien, but lives on its own as a standalone movie."
So what about that "almost certainly"? "In advance of knowing what we’re going to do, I suppose you could say yes, [Ford] could [return]," Kosove admits. "But I think it is quite unlikely.”