Sometimes in Hollywood, the stars align and the right director finds the right movie and we can an instant classic. That, in fact, happened when Denis Villeneuve was brought on to direct Blade Runner 2049 after grumpy, old man Ridley Scott had to step away to work on Alien: Covenant. However, if you’re Scott you don’t quite agree that the stars aligned. The director says he wishes he had been able to direct Blade Runner 2049 and regrets his inability to do so.
“I shouldn’t have had to make that decision,” Scott said while speaking to Empire (via Variety). “But I had to. I should have done ‘Blade Runner 2.’”
The end result of Scott choosing to focus on Alien: Covenant was, of course, one of the greatest modern sci-fi films ever made and a rare sequel that was as good as, if not better than, the original (yea, I said it). Despite a middling box office, the movie not only relaunched Blade Runner as a franchise but garnered Oscar nominations and critical praise across the board while somehow almost making Jared Leto tolerable. That’s not to mention that it truly pushed Villeneuve into the spotlight as a leading sci-fi director and most likely is why we have him directing Dune now. It’s hard to imagine Scott’s version of the film being anything as groundbreaking or lasting, especially considering his other sequel work on the Alien franchise has been nothing but underwhelming.
Despite wanting to have directed Blade Runner 2049, Scott is not stepping into the director chair for the next installment of the franchise, Blade Runner 2099. Scott will act as a producer on the upcoming Amazon Prime series, which takes place 50 years after the previous film, and says that the series will take inspiration from Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World. That, of course, is not the only Blade Runner TV show, as an animated series called Blade Runner: Black Lotus came out in 2021 but didn’t garner that much fan fare.
