Harrison Ford officially offered role to return as Deckard in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner sequel

Alcon Entertainment has asked Harrison Ford to reprise his role as Rick Deckard in the Ridley Scott-directed Blade Runner sequel, Variety reports.

Hampton Fancher – co-writer of the screenplay of the cult classic original sci-fi thriller with David Peoples – and Michael Green are writing the script. The story of the sequel is being kept secret other than being set several decades after the conclusion of the original film — which was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1993.

According to reports, Alcon has been working on the Blade Runner sequel project for three years, since announcing in early 2011 that it had secured film, TV and ancillary franchise rights from producer Bud Yorkin, to produce prequels and sequels to the iconic film.

The original 1982 film, based on Philip K. Dick’s classic sci-fi novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” also starred Rutger Hauer as the leader of a group of escaped “replicants” — genetically engineered androids used for work on Earth’s off-world colonies — who are hiding out in a 2019 dystopian version of Los Angeles. Harrison was a “blade runner,” a special police unit trained specifically to kill rogue replicants when called upon. Blade Runner also starred Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Daryl Hannah, William Sanderson, Brion James, Joe Turkel, Joanna Cassidy, James Hong, Morgan Paull, Kevin Thompson, John Edward Allen, Hy Pyke, Kimiko Hiroshige, Bob Okazaki and Carolyn DeMirjian.

Blade Runner was nominated for Academy Awards for visual effects and art direction. The story was the first of Dick’s works to be adapted into a movie by Hollywood studios, setting the stage for future projects such as Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck and The Adjustment Bureau.