Now that Warner Bros. and Alcon Entertainment are beginning to wrap up their casting spree for Blade Runner 2, Denis Villeneuve’s long-in-development sequel is primed to enter active production some point this month.
It takes place long after Rick Deckard first stalked the drenched neon streets of a dystopian Los Angeles – around 30 years, according to early reports – though the first concept art emerging today for Villeneuve’s sci-fi sequel confirms that, yes, Blade Runner 2 will retain much of the tech noir aesthetic that helped put Ridley Scott’s genre piece on the map back in 1982. Once the movie shook off its middling box office performance to become a cult hit, that is.
Warner has no plans to follow a similar route to success, though, with Villeneuve telling Entertainment Weekly that “failure is not an option,” but admitted that the general mood in the pre-production camp is overly positive: “It’s a great team and spirits are very high.
Reflecting on his own connection with the Blade Runner IP, the Sicario filmmaker revealed that he has cultivated a deep understanding of Ridley Scott’s original work, and seems to know it beat for beat.
“I remember the opening sequence perfectly,” Villeneuve says, adding that he’s seen the movie “thousands of times” and knows it by heart. “That note of music; seeing Los Angeles in 2019; that smog; that darkness. It’s really the movie that gave birth to my desire to become a director.”
Heralding the return of Harrison Ford as Deckard, Villeneuve’s follow-up has also welcomed aboard Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Carla Juri, Guardians fan-favorite Dave Bautista and Captain Phillips tar Barkhad Abdi.
More than three decades on from Ridley Scott’s seminal original, Blade Runner 2 will descend on theaters on October 6, 2017.