Recent reports that Harrison Ford was in preliminary grumpy discussion to return for Ridley Scott’s new Blade Runner film set off a capillary dilation of the so-called blush response, a fluctuation of the pupil, and an involuntary dilation of the iris—or “a pissed-off Internet” for short. It was also confusing, given that both Scott and producer Andrew Kosove had been talking up the probable sequel as a “total reinvention” with an all-new cast, even going so far as to say explicitly that Harrison Ford wouldn’t be in it. But as it turns out, the always semi-reliable (yet frequently good for a scoop) site TwitchFilm was, once again, semi-reliable: Kosove has now denied the rumor to Deadline, saying, “It is absolutely patently false that there has been any discussion about Harrison Ford being in Blade Runner.”
In fact, there hasn’t been any discussion about anyone being in it, as right now Scott and Kosove are still figuring out what they want to do with the story—though Kosove did confirm a lot of assumptions by saying they’re using as their “template” the related-but-not-totally-so model of Prometheus to Alien. And to that end, it would be both distracting to the actual purpose of the film and frustrating to fans to even suggest the possibility, however unlikely, that Ford could return. So naturally Kosove said, “I suppose you could say yes, he could. But I think it is quite unlikely,” because that whole bait-then-deny strategy has worked out pretty well for Prometheus so far.