We’ve been through the various stages of possibility about Harrison Ford returning to another of his iconic sci-fi films as the Blade Runner sequel has made its way across the harsh cityscape of development. He’s thinking about it! He likes the script but he’s not sure! He’s been offered the gig... Well, now he’s officially aboard to once more play Rick Deckard.
With Ridley Scott acting as producer on this one, confirming word from around the Exodus press tour that he wouldn’t be back in the director’s chair given his schedule, Prisoners’ Denis Villeneuve is in negotiations to take over that job, which would see him working from a script by Hampton Fancher, co-writer of the 1982 original, who cranked out the words this time with Michael Green.
As for what story those words will tell? So far, the only real details is that, like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the new film will acknowledge the passage of time and is set several decades after Scott’s first crack at adapting Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?. Will it confirm the theory that Deckard himself is a Replicant? How will society have changed? And given that modern day cities now resemble the futuristic, advert-drenched Los Angeles of 2019 (aside from the flying cars, darn it), how will a sequel made now jump the visuals forward so that it still seems like the future? We’ll have to wait to find out, as the plan is not to start shooting until summer 2016, which means the new movie won’t hit screens until 2017 at the earliest.