Rumors of Harrison Ford returning for another Blade Runner film spread like wildfire across the ‘Net over the past few days, but were doused almost as quickly.
As soon as I saw the initial reports, my first reaction was WTF, as I’m sure it was for many others, because anyone who knows anything about the history of Blade Runner understands it would practically take Bill Gates writing a check to meet Ford’s exorbitant price.
As several involved in the original Blade Runner recalled in the book Blockbuster, director Ridley Scott and Ford apparently had the same problem the Alien cast had with Ridley.
They wanted direction, and he was too busy to be bothered.
“Harrison wanted to be directed,” said Alan Ladd Jr., who greenlit Star Wars at Fox and who released Blade Runner through The Ladd Company.
“Ridley wanted to fool around with light. Harrison just wanted to be reassured. At that time Ridley was very shy, and didn’t want to deal with actors. He knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to explain to the actors how to get there.”
Eventually it got so bad, Ladd had to be the go-between because Ford and Scott wouldn’t speak to each other.
But back to the present, where the news hit Deadline that Alcon Entertainment “adamantly denied” Ford will be back aboard, with Alcon executive Andrew Kosove telling the site, “What we are trying to do with Ridley is trying to break the back of the story, figure out the direction were going to take the movie and find a writer to work on it. The casting of the movie could not be further from our minds.”
Kosove added that what Scott has done with Prometheus, which is still pretty much a mystery wrapped in an engima, “is a good template for what we’re trying to do. He created something that has some association to the original Alien, but lives on its own as a stand alone movie.”
Of course, there were also rumors going around that Russell Crowe was being considered for the remake of Robocop, which the actor vehemently denied via Twitter with a flat out, “No,” according to ComicBookMovie.
Interesting casting choice if he was ever seriously in the running, but you get the impression that like Ford, Crowe’s been phoning it in a lot lately, and nothing could sink a new Robocop faster than an actor who, like Kurt Loder wrote in his review of Robin Hood, is “glum… heavily morose” and “charmless,” even if he is just playing a robot.
