'Blade Runner' Writer to Re-Team with Director Ridley Scott on Sequel

Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

"Blade Runner"

Original Blade Runner writer Hampton Fancher is in talks to pen an idea for an untitled sequel to the classic sci-fi film for director Ridley Scott and studio Alcon Entertainment.

Alcon and Scott are mum on plot details but they confirm that the story will be set “some years after the first film concluded,” according to a statement released Thursday.

Blade Runner, which hit theaters in 1982 starring Harrison Ford, was an adaptation of the Phillip K. Dick story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Fancher shared screenplay credit with David Peoples.

The movie was a box-office disappointment when it was first released but has since become one of the most important films in the sci-fi genre. Ford played a “blade runner,” an expert on artificial humans, who is brought in to hunt down several rebellious "replicants."

Fancher, an actor who appeared on shows such as Gunsmoke, Rawhide and 77 Sunset Strip, wrote fiction on the side. Despite co-writing Blade Runner, his screenwriting career never took off, although he did pen the 1989 crime movie The Mighty Quinn and wrote and directed the 1999 serial killer thriler The Minus Man, which starred Owen Wilson and Sheryl Crow.

Scott is producing with Alcon’s Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove as well as Bud Yorkin and Cynthia Sikes Yorkin.

Frank Giustra and Tim Gamble, who run Thunderbird Films, are executive producing.

Fancher is repped by APA and attorney Matt Saver.