Maybe it’s just us, but sometimes walking around Downtown LA at night can really feel like being inside Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. The movie showed a 2019 version of a city divided between gritty and modern, old-school noir and sci-fi high-tech, which doesn’t take too much squinting to envision. Hollywood is apparently not content to leave us alone with that uncanny sense that the replicants actually be living among us, because now a Blade Runner sequel is in production and the just-released art might become the backdrop of our next nightmare.
Photograph: Courtesy Entertainment Weekly/Alcon Entertainment/Warner Bros
The first-peek images, released by Entertainment Weeklyjust in time for ComicCon, show Los Angeles in dark, moody night mode with the mega-city bleakness punctuated only by massive digital billboards and futuristic freeway traffic. We are told that, in this fictional future, LA has sprawled out to take over most of the entire West Coast.
Photograph: Courtesy Entertainment Weekly/Alcon Entertainment/Warner Bros
You might almost think it was all real life, were it not for one production image showing pouring rain, snow and flooding. Uncannily human-like androids with dubious motives, sure, but that much water in Southern California? Now that's a bit of a stretch.
The new film is set to debut in October. Details of the plot are slim so far—the Philip K. Dick book which the original Blade Runner was based on doesn’t have a sequel to draw from, but the adaptation was always a loose one—however, we do know that the cast includes Ryan Gosling alongside Harrison Ford who will be reprising his classic role from the first film.