Papa Vinyard here, now here's a little somethin' for ya...
Alcon Entertainment has pulled the bizarre move of announcing that they've sent out an offer to Harrison Ford to reprise his role of Rick Deckard for the BLADE RUNNER sequel Ridley Scott is currently developing. This is not confirmation at all that Ford will actually appear in BR 2.0 or even that he (and his people) are currently in negotiations, just that…they want him!
From my perspective, this indicates two things. One, most obviously, that Deckard (or potentially a Deckard-looking replicant?) has been incorporated into the current script by Michael Green and original scribe Hampton Fancher. Two, that Scott and Alcon are happy enough with this script to make this announcement before any concrete sign of interest from Ford's camp (although he has discussed the possibility of returning to the character).
If Ford's comments from October were true, then he and Scott have been discussing this project for a while, and there's a chance that talks with the actor are further along than either Deadline or Alcon is letting on. The question is, does the current draft honor the character enough to earn Ford's interest in returning? Considering the rumors that he played a part in beefing up Han Solo's part in EPISODE VII (and removing himself from VIII and IX?), it's possible that Deckard is going to have a more central role in this sequel than Scott has previously indicated.
There's also the nagging fact that both the Director's and Final Cuts of the original BLADE RUNNER heavily imply that Deckard is a replicant himself and only has a limited lifespan, thus never reaching the 70-year-old look that current-era Ford currently brandishes. Sure, the theatrical cut implied that both Deckard and Rachel would live together happily somewhere outside L.A., but is that really considered canon? Hasn't Scott bent over backwards to create this idea that Deckard is surely a replican? Would he really want to toss that out just to, as Ford put it, "generate nostalgic moments"?
Or, and I'm just thinkin' out loud here, could Ford be playing either a. the human model for the original Deckard replicant, or b. yet another (older-looking)incarnation of replicant Deckard?
There are still a million questions regarding this sequel, not the least of which being the size of whatever role they're offering to Ford, but now that there's money on the table, we can be positively sure of one thing: they want him back. And I think, as long as they do it right, so do we.
-Vincent Kim-Zahedi
”Papa Vinyard”
vincentzahedi@gmail.com
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