It is no easy task to bring a beloved franchise back to the big screen. It is exponentially harder when you are not the original creator or director of the original. We have recently seen this pressure payoff (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Jurassic World), and we have also seen huge missed-steps causing these films to fail (Ghostbusters). It is a tricky road, and the entire you have the looming cloud of fan backlash at your doorstep. One director who is well aware of this pressure is Blade Runner 20149 director Dennis Villeneuve (Sicario).
Although Villeneuve has had recent success, his next film is a followup to arguably one of the biggest films ever made – Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In a recent interview with Heat Vision, Villeneuve says that he and the film’s star Ryan Gosling are well aware of the pressures of taking on Blade Runner 2049:
“Ryan Gosling and I made peace with the idea that the chances of success were very narrow. I came on board because the script was very strong. But no matter what you do, no matter how good what you’re doing is, the film will always be compared to the first, which is a masterpiece. So I made peace with that. And when you make piece with that you are free.
To take Ridley Scott’s universe and try to make it my own was a really big task for me. [Scott gave me the] biggest gift of all, which is freedom. He said, it’s your movie. I’ll be there if you need me, otherwise I’ll be away, and I must say he was not there physically, but I felt his presence all the time, because I was dealing with his universe all the time. So in a way he wasn’t there, but he was there a lot at the same time.”
Blade Runner 2049 brings back Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, reigniting the debate of whether Deckard is a Replicant. A new trailer is expected to hit on Monday.
Thirty years after the events of the first film, a new blade runner, LAPD Officer K, unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard, a former LAPD blade runner who has been missing for 30 years.
Blade Runner 2049 stars Harrison Ford, Jared Leto, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Dave Bautista and Robin Wright. It hits theaters on October 7.
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