So now that Ridley Scott has finished part 1 of his return to the universe of 'Alien' which he helped start back in 1979, there are also plans to begin the sequel to his other sci-fi classic from 1982, 'Blade Runner'. This is an idea I'm much, much more skeptical about. Whether you liked Prometheus or not, you have to give certain people credit for taking what was essentially an art piece by H.R. Giger, meant at the time as something that was there to add to the levity of horror and mystery inside the 'Alien' ship, and made a tangent story out of it; a story that's not yet finished. With Blade Runner however, its one of those movies that's good enough to stand on its own and has for thirty years. One of the reasons it attracted people at the time of its release was because it was something that audiences really hadn't seen before-it was a dark and dystopian outlook on where society was headed in a relatively short period of time and was really the opposite of a film like 2001: A Space Odyssey where everything is grand and pristine and optimistic overall. And since the early 80's there have been about a billion other movies ,because of movies like Blade Runner, that are everything from pre-apocalypse to apocalypse to post apocalypse with other themes in between where the world of Blade Runner is. So at this point I don't believe a sequel has the power or the relevance needed. It may have been doable a couple years after or even 20 years ago.
Its a weird area for fans and filmmakers and we're starting to see a pattern with a lot of the established directors. Lucas and Spielberg disrupted the Indy trilogy after 20 something years to make the critical flop that was 'Kingdom of The Crystal Skull'. But in my opinion there have been exceptional successes. Last year there was the prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing with the same name and I personally thought it was great. 'Rocky Balboa' I liked probably just as much as 1 and 2 which I still see as one big movie. For fans of Blade Runner its just another "We'll have to wait and see.".