Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Alcon Entertainment, the producer/financier teaming with director Ridley Scott to return to the world of the 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner, is adamantly denying a web report claiming original star Harrison Ford is in early talks to return as replicant hunter Rick Deckard. Andrew Kosove, who runs Alcon with Broderick Johnson, said he and his partner couldn’t sit by as the unsubstantiated report spread like wildfire all over the world. That’s the downside of the digital world, where reports spread virally and nobody checks, particularly if it comes from a site like Twitchfilm.com, which sometimes comes up with some good scoops. Blade Runner is the rare movie whose cult status and passionate fan base is evidenced by the fact that when I broke the story about Scott returning to direct, there were so many comments that the site crashed temporarily, and I doubt I ever got more comments on any story I’ve filed here.

“It is absolutely patently false that there has been any discussion about Harrison Ford being in Blade Runner,” Kosove told me. “To be clear, what we are trying to do with Ridley now is go through the painstaking process of trying to break the back of the story, figure out the direction we’re 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 at this moment.”

Kosove said they didn’t want in any way to disparage an iconic actor like Ford, but it certainly sounds as though they do not plan to continue his story line. “It’s like asking if we’re going to make the sky red or blue, there has been no discussion about it,” he said. “What Ridley does in Prometheus 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 standalone movie.” Asked point blank if Ford could resurface, Kosove said: “In advance of knowing what we’re going to do, I supposed you could say yes, he could. But I think it is quite unlikely.”