Producers of a planned sequel to the iconic sci-fi movie Blade Runner have taken the highly unusual step of publicly offering the lead role to its original star, Harrison Ford.
Alcon Entertainment, which has already convinced Ridley Scott to return for a follow-up to his futuristic 1982 tale, issued a statement on Thursday extolling the virtues of its proposal. The sequel will be written by Blade Runner’s original architect Hampton Fancher, with Michael Green, the screenwriter of the poorly received Green Lantern movie from 2011.
“We believe that Hampton Fancher and Michael Green have crafted with Ridley Scott an extraordinary sequel to one of the greatest films of all time,” said producers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove in their joint statement. “We would be honoured, and we are hopeful, that Harrison will be part of our project.”
Alcon’s move could be a last-gasp effort to convince the 71-year-old Ford that he should return to one of his best known roles, or simply an acknowledgment that the project faces commercial and critical purgatory without its best known asset. Scott had already shown himself to be willing to return to previously trodden sci-fi territory with 2012’s Prometheus, a pseudo prequel to his classic space slasher Alien from 1979. Meanwhile Ford is reprising his role as Han Solo in the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII.
Based on the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was not an instant hit at the time but has gathered plaudits during the years since. Set in an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, Scott’s movie is about a “blade runner” called Deckard, played by Ford, who has to hunt down a gang of android outlaws (replicants) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony.
Negative criticism of the film was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of Scott’s director’s cut, which excised the original’s voiceover and a pegged-on happy ending. Dick never wrote a sequel to the book, and three follow-up novels by his friend KW Jeter were poorly received. The new film’s writers will therefore most likely be working to produce an original story.
Alcon had earlier suggested that Ford’s return for the sequel was unlikely. Apart from anything else, it would undercut the original film’s central tantalising question — of whether Deckard himself is a replicant — because the bioengineered humanoids do not live for more than a few years.
