Last time we heard from director Ridley Scott on the matter of his plans to resurrect his early sci-fi success Blade Runner for a sequel, he was still unable to give an answer as to whether Harrison Ford would be reprising his role as eponymous blade runner Deckard. The rumor of this casting choice has previously circled and been shot down, and Scott would only say that he wasn’t going to rule out the possibility.
Ideally, Scott needs to lock down a script before he can begin casting in earnest, and details as to what the Blade Runner sequel might be about have remained vague at best. Some time after the release of Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick’s friend K.W. Jeter wrote three sequels to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it’s unclear whether Scott’s movie sequel will follow the storyline established in those books at all, or whether it will follow entirely new characters.
The Wrap now reports that, according to an anonymous source close to production, Scott has tapped Green Lantern co-writer Michael Green as a writer for the Blade Runner sequel. The article also states that the film will be a sequel rather than a prequel, set quite a few years after the plot of the original, which is congruous with what we’ve heard about the story before.
Obviously, Green Lantern was not altogether well-received, but before you start feeling too dismayed by Green’s assignment to the Blade Runner sequel script, it’s important to remember that he was only one of the four writers who worked on Green Lantern. A better measure of his abilities would be to look at the episodes he wrote for season 1 of Smallville, the first season of Heroes and recent found-footage show The River.
Green also worked on a script for The Flash, and the connections to comic book movies aren’t coincidental; Green has written for DC series Batman Confidential, Supergirl and Superman/Batman.
This isn’t necessarily what you’d call a bad choice of writer, but considering the original act that the Blade Runner sequel has to follow, as well as the slight skepticism toward revived Ridley Scott classics after Prometheus didn’t quite live up to the hype, this is one project that could probably have done with having a more proven name attached to the script.
It’s worth mentioning that at one point Scott was working on the film with one of Blade Runner‘s co-writers, Hampton Fancher, whom Scott claimed “still speaks the speak,” to write the sequel’s script. The plans for Fancher’s version seemed to be quite far along, with Scott saying that the film would be set several years after the original and would definitely feature a female protagonist, and so it’s quite possible that Green is simply rewriting or polishing up Fancher’s script, rather than starting again from scratch.
Blade Runner‘s other co-writer, David Webb Peoples, unfortunately seems to have gone into retirement since writing the screenplay for Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1998 film Soldier, which – according to Peoples – existed in the same universe as Blade Runner.
Are you still excited for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner sequel, or did you enjoy how open-ended the first film was?
Source:
http://screenrant.com/blade-runner-2-green-lantern-writer/_____
