The opening of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is iconic, evocative, and sets the stage for the film beautifully. There’s some very faint and moody sounds from Vangelis’ score, some agonizingly slow opening credits, a Star Wars-style crawl establishing the world of replicants and Blade Runners, and then, finally, it opens on a dramatic shot of Los Angeles in 2019. The city looks remarkably similar to how it does today—just with more pyramids and flying cars—but then the synthesizers really kick in and there’s a closeup of an eye, really selling the idea that this is a shitty-yet-awesome vision of the future.
Now, Ryan Gosling has signed on to star in director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2, and Harrison Ford is set to reprise his role as Rick Deckard, so it seems like the long-in-the-works sequel is really happening. To mark this unexpected development, /Film is reporting that Scott (who is producing the sequel) has revealed his idea for how Blade Runner 2 should open, and it happens to be the same way he had originally intended for the first movie to start. This new/old intro doesn’t seem to have as much style as what made it into Blade Runner, but there’s still a bit of that dystopian charm.
It starts (presumably after the unbearably long credits and Star Wars-style crawl) on a farm in Wyoming, which is about as far from the original’s bleak and endless Los Angeles as you can get. The farm’s fields stretch on forever, with nothing but dry dirt until the horizon. Then, the camera turns around there’s “a massive tree” that is “being supported and kept alive by wires that are holding the tree up.” Scott compares it to The Grapes Of Wrath, adding that there’s a “white cottage with a porch” next to the tree. In the distance, an enormous combine works on the fields, and after a moment a flying car zooms in and lands in front of the house. We’ll let Scott take the rest:
The doors open, a guy gets out and there you’ve got Rick Deckard. He walks in to the cottage, opens the door, smells stew, sits down and waits for the guy to pull up to the house to arrive. The guy’s seen him, so the guy pulls the combine behind the cottage and it towers three stories above it, and the man climbs down from a ladder – a big man. He steps onto the balcony and he goes to Harrison’s side. The cottage actually [creaks]; this guy’s got to be 350 pounds. I’m not going to say anything else – you’ll have to go see the movie.
/Film notes that the original Blade Runner script ended this scene with Deckard shooting the big man and ripping off his jaw, revealing that he’s actually a replicant. No matter how you interpret the first film’s ending, though, it seems hard to believe that Deckard would still be Blade Running as an old man. Of course, if this scene does make it to Blade Runner 2, it could be positioned as a flashback, or Ryan Gosling could replace Harrison Ford, or maybe the Rick Deckard who kills the big man isn’t the same Rick Deckard as the one in the last movie (because he was a replicant and you know it, stop lying to yourself).