Christopher Nolan may be busy preparing The Dark Knight Rises and producer Zack Snyder’s Superman flick, but if some people get their way, he’ll be following those up with a prequel or sequel to Blade Runner.
It was announced last week that prequels and/or sequels to director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece are in the works, with Broderick Johnson and Andrew A. Kosove buying the rights and overseeing the project for Alcon Entertainment. With fans of the original movie immediately expressing their displeasure at the idea of tampering with the Blade Runner universe, Johnson and Kosove have gone on the offesive, saying it’s early days, nothing’s definite and that they’re very keen to involve top flight talent and not sully the reputation of Ridley Scott’s movie.
Now Kosove has been talking to io9, and he’s tried to alleviate scepticism by saying those words most likely to get film buffs and remake haters on his side – he wants The Dark Knight Rises director and beloved fanboy auteur Christopher Nolan to helm his continuation of the Blade Runner saga.
Kosove says…. “Our friend Christopher Nolan who we did Insomnia [with] would be the pie in the sky for us… To be clear I think what Christopher Nolan did – and to be clear, we cannot remake Blade Runner. As a legal matter, we have not bought the remake rights we have no interest in remaking it we can only do prequels or sequels. But I think the methodology that Christopher Nolan brought to Batman is precisely what we aspire to whomever the filmmaker is, whether Ridley Scott comes back and joins us or it’s someone else. It’s precisely what we aspire to with Blade Runner, that’s the template for us.”
Of course that also suggests they’ll be reaching out to Ridley Scott, with Kosove adding, “The answer to that question is as follows. I’m going to answer it very briefly – we won’t say if we’ve reached out to Ridley Scott or not, but what we will say is that Ridley Scott’s blessing to what we’re doing is very important to Alcon. It’s important to Bud Yorkin, and certainly we have the greatest degree of respect to him as a filmmaker. He’s one of the greatest living directors and one of the greatest directors of all time. So of course he’s very important.”
At the moment everything’s highly speculative, and there’s no reason to think Nolan would be interested, although I’m sure a lot of the fanboys would be more on-side with a Blade Runner follow-up if he was. And with Scott returning to the Alien universe (sort of), it does suggest he might be willing to be involved somewhow in a project that revisits one of his classics.
However, Kosove does add something else that puts the project’s current very early status slightly into perspective, “This may work, or it may not work. We may make this movie, but in truth it may never get made.” We’ll have to wait and see.