Giant Freakin Robot

Blade Runner 2 is primed and moving ahead with director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Enemy at the helm), and star Harrison Ford set to reprise one of his greatest roles (though you have to wonder if his recent plane crash and injuries will have an impact on the timeline). More immediately, at least if you live in the U.K., Blade Runner: The Final Cut is getting a theatrical rerelease, and just in case you somehow sustained a head injury and forgot how great Blade Runner is, here’s a gorgeous trailer to remind you.

We’ve made some Christmas wishes recently here at Giant Freakin’ Robot, but I can’t trust this wish with only one mere holiday. I need to use up an entire year of days, or possibly even a decade, in order to make this one come true. For my wish is for director Ridley Scott to go the rest of his career without going forward with a sequel to any of his films. And if my nickname of Ridley “One and Done” Scott would catch on, that would be cool, too.

Scott is currently in production on one of my most anticipated features of 2015 (or whenever it actually comes out), an adaptation of Andy Weir’s stellar sci-fi novel The Martian. It’s a film that fits into his wheelhouse quite well, as it takes an epic-scale story and brings it down to a human level. But just because Scott has a wheelhouse doesn’t mean he’s always successful with the results, and he’s got enough solid flicks on his resume that any project he talks about gets mass amounts of attention. He’s been talking a lot about extending the story of both a genre classic, Blade Runner, and what is already a pseudo-sequel, Prometheus.

The 2014 Black List just came out this past week, running down the best unproduced screenplays of the year. There are a handful of promising science fiction entries, but while these screenplays are members of a pretty restricted club, the script for Ridley Scott’s upcoming genre joint The Martian has been somewhere even more exclusive, it’s actually been to space.

Earlier this month, when NASA launched their Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle on a its first test flight, the cover page for Drew Goddard’s script, complete with a drawing by the legendary director, went along for the ride, travelling 5600 miles above the surface of the Earth. That’s some seriously geeky cred.

The idea of Blade Runner 2 is a tricky proposition for most of us, especially happening 30 plus years down the road. It sounds exciting at first, like, “Ooh, more Blade Runner,” but when we start to actually think about what that means all the creeping fears and concerns materialize, and we worry that it will be terrible and taint the legacy of the first film. There’s a script for Blade Runner 2, and apparently at least one key player, Harrison Ford, thinks it’s pretty awesome.

Pumping his latest film, the biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, Ridley Scott stopped to talk to MTV, and as happens rather frequently, the subject of Blade Runner 2 came up. (So did Prometheus 2, which we’ll get to as well.) Scott confirmed that the screenplay is ready to go, but also reiterated that he’s not going to direct. (Honestly, after watching Exodus, which is a jumbled mess of a movie, and more than anything boring as all hell, this bit of news doesn’t bum me out as much as it did a couple of weeks ago.)

Most, if not all of us have trouble with the idea of Blade Runner 2 happening. It’s been more than 30 years since Ridley Scott delivered one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, and sequels that happen this far after the fact, well, lets just say they can be hit and miss. Still, it’s been in the works for years, especially the last few, and it is expected to shoot in 2015, but we just received word that two major parts may not play as major a role as we expected, as Scott and star Harrison Ford’s level of involvement just took a drastic nosedive.

Scott is on the publicity trail, stumping for his upcoming biblical epic, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and talking to Variety the subject of Blade Runner 2 came up. That is where he said he won’t direct the film. Though this is hardly surprising—with movies like The Martian, which is scheduled to begin filming later this year, and Prometheus 2 on the horizon, he’s going to be busy—it’s difficult to imagine anyone but Scott at the helm of a Blade Runner movie. Though James Cameron directed Aliens, the sequel to Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, and that turned out pretty well, so who knows.

Talking about Prometheus 2 a while back, director Ridley Scott indicated that, though set in the same universe as his 1979 classic Alien, the new film will not feature the iconic xenomorphs. While we were disappointed to hear that we won’t be seeing one of the most terrifying creatures in cinema history, that doesn’t mean there won’t be all kinds of nasty beasts to contend with, and Scott has some big, terrifying changes in mind.

A while back, talking about the various drafts of the scripts, Scott said that, “there’s only so much snarling you can do,” and that he intends to introduce something new and “interesting.” He left it at that for the time, but recently, speaking to The Australian, he had more specific things to add to the conversation: