Last August we reported Ridley Scott would be producing and directing “a new installment” of Blade Runner, returning to another franchise he started 30 years ago (the other being Alien prequel Prometheus). At the time, producer Andrew Kosove told the LA Times “In no way do I speak for Ridley Scott but if you’re asking me will this movie have anything to do with Harrison Ford, the answer is no. This is a total reinvention and in my mind that means doing everything fresh, including casting.”
In November, Ridley Scott told The Wall Street Journal that the film was “liable to be a sequel” and that the film would be moving forward “not with the past cast, of course.” When asked specifically if Harrison Ford’s character of Deckard would be in the film, Scott said, “No, not really.”
Now Twitch is reporting that Harrison Ford has entered into talks to join the cast of the new Blade Runner, which they’re saying will likely be a direct sequel to the original. This doesn’t quite pass the sniff test with us. The movie left the question, “Was Deckard a replicant?” open-ended. If you bring Ford back and he’s 30 years older, rather than an immortal Nexus-7, it undermines some of the original movie’s provocativeness. We’re supposed to think he might be a replicant, so we further question what it means to be human. Also, as BleedingCool says, it “must have taken some big digging to find a hole for these monster hatchets”. Ford and Ridley clashed on the set of Blade Runner (see videos below), and haven’t worked together since.
When Harrison Ford was asked about the new Blade Runner movie last year, he kept it mostly polite:
I don’t have any feeling whatsoever. It was an interesting part of my professional life, I’m glad I made that movie, I’m glad that it got released without the hideous voice-over [Ed.- ZING!] and I don’t know anything about it. I don’t have a judgement about how wise it is to revisit it. I personally think if you’re gonna do… The ambition every time that I’ve been involved in a sequel of a film or a movie that had a number of iterations, I always felt that we were responsible for bringing something new to the characters and to the experience of the audience. If they go into it with the ambition and some very good idea of how to bring something new to it, maybe it’ll be successful.
I wouldn’t feel bad if I were not invited to the party, because I would understand they would want fresh blood to be spilled. So there you are. They’re making another Jack Ryan movie and I’m not involved. So that’s the way it is. [Omelete, translated by Collider]
Speaking of spilling fresh blood, be sure to spill some the next time the director tells you the “something new” they’re bringing is going to be Shia LaBeouf and his monkey army, because that sh-t is unacceptable.
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, Alcon Entertainment co-runner Andrew Kosove tells Deadline: “It is absolutely patently false that there has been any discussion about Harrison Ford being in Blade Runner.”
[Image credit: s_bukley / Shutterstock.com, with some alterations]