Could Blade Runner 2099 Finally Take the Franchise to Space? – Den of Geek

At the end of the first film, Roy Battys famous soliloquy even cinches the notion that nearly everything that most Replicants experience happens Off-world. When Roy says, Ive seen things you people wouldnt believe all of the stuff he describes are extraterrestrial. Roy has been to space, while Deckard and most of the other major characters in Blade Runner are stuck on a planet most humans wish to leave.

In the original Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the idea that people are moving Off-world is hammered home even more clearly than it is in the film. Various apartment buildings are now essentially empty because of the exciting opportunities offered in space. You get the sense that most of the human race has moved on from their home planet by this point, making Deckards desire to own a real-life animal, a status symbol on a largely undesirable Earth, feel all the more tragic and pathetic.

Although we never leave Earth in either Blade Runner or Blade Runner 2049, the very nature of the story requires us to understand that the implicit illegality of Replicants on Earth is the direct result of their being legal Off-world. As stated in the first film, right at the beginning, Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. In other words, interplanetary travel is a huge fact-of-life in the Blade Runner future.

Beyond expanding the world-building, or further validating Scotts interest in robots in space (see also, Alien, Prometheus, et al.), theres another good argument for taking Blade Runner 2099 into space. Up until now, all onscreen iterations of Blade Runner have essentially relied on the exact same setting and aesthetics. Even the recent twisty animated series, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, mostly keeps things focused on a dystopian Los Angeles, which is true of a big chunk of Blade Runner 2049, too. And, even though Denis Villeneuves film struck out to a dusty, abandoned Las Vegas, theres still a very specific kind of scope were dealing with here. But why?

Theres nothing that says the universe of Blade Runner has to be stuck in a rain swept American city. The noir-cyberpunk vibe of Blade Runner could easily be reproduced outside of the confines of Earth, on one of the space colonies teased in the original film, particularly if this next series is set roughly five decades after where we left Deckard and Agent K.

Because of when the original film was made, the present of Blade Runner is starting to look a tiny bit like the past. Jumping so far ahead for the next story could, for a lack of a better word, help the franchise feel futuristic again. If part of that cyberpunk futurism includes actual space travel, we should finally get to see what that future looks like.

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Could Blade Runner 2099 Finally Take the Franchise to Space? - Den of Geek