With Ridley Scott starting to do the promotion circuit for this summer’s Prometheus, reporters are already peppering him with questions about his next most anticipated project – his mysterious follow up to his 1982 classic Blade Runner. And we are already getting some news about how the project might be shaping up. Spoilers obviously follow, though they are fairly vague.
First up is a small tidbit about the film’s protagonist, specifically their sex. This nugget comes out of an interview with The Daily Beast and was dropped in the midst of a discussion about Ridley’s use of a strong protagonist in Alien.
Funny enough, I started my first meetings on the Blade Runner sequel last week. We have a very good take on it. And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist.
If you read closely, you’ll actually find two bits of information. The first being that the hero of the film, or at least one of the heroes, will be female.
But Scott also reveals that the project will be a sequel, where before all involved were playing coy as to whether the film would be a prequel or a sequel to Blade Runner. The producers of the film, Alcon Entertainment, confirmed that it will be a sequel in their press release announcing that original Blade Runner Hampton Fancher was coming back to write the new film. (Bolded for emphasis.)
LOS ANGELES, CA, MAY 17, 2012—Hampton Fancher is in talks to reunite with his “Blade Runner” director Ridley Scott to develop the idea for the original screenplay for the Alcon Entertainment, Scott Free, and Bud Yorkin produced follow up to the ground-breaking 1982 science fiction classic, it was announced by Alcon co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove.
The filmmakers are also revealing for the first time that the much-anticipated project is intended to be a sequel to the renowned original. The filmmakers would reveal only that the new story will take place some years after the first film concluded.
The three-time Oscar-nominated Scott and his “Blade Runner” collaborator Fancher originally conceived of their 1982 classic as the first in a series of films incorporating the themes and characters featured in Philip K. Dick‘s groundbreaking novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?“, from which “Blade Runner” was adapted. Circumstances, however, took Scott into other directions and the project never advanced.
Fancher, although a writer of fiction, was known primarily as an actor at the time Scott enlisted him to adapt the Dick novel for the screen. Fancher followed his “Blade Runner” success with the screenplays, “The Mighty Quinn” (1989) and “The Minus Man” (1999). He has continued to write fiction throughout his career.
Scott also will produce with Alcon co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove as well as Bud Yorkin and Cynthia Sikes Yorkin. Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble, CEO’s of Thunderbird Films, will serve as executive producers.
The original film, which has been singled out as the greatest science-fiction film of all time by a majority of genre publications, was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1993 and is frequently taught in university courses. In 2007, it was named the 2nd most visually influential film of all time by the Visual Effects Society.
State Kosove and Johnson: “It is a perfect opportunity to reunite Ridley with Hampton on this new project, one in fact inspired by their own personal collaboration, a classic of cinema if there ever was one.”
Setting this new film “some years after the first film concluded,” does seem to leave the door open for a return of Harrison Ford, doesn’t it?
