There are many things that tie the upcoming Blade Runner 2049 to Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner: Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard, the replicants, the Tyrell Corporation, and — most importantly, for those fans who are skeptical of the sequel — the original Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher, who co-wrote the script of the 1982 movie adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel.

At Comic Con, Collider spoke a bit about the new movie with Fancher, and he talked about how this actually wasn’t the first time he’d thought about writing a Blade Runner sequel:

When we finished the first one, within a year we were talking about a second one. Ridley called, I was in New York and I went out to LA, and we batted stories around. Nothing came of it because of legal problems.

I guess, because I was reading in the newspapers, I thought Deckard had come to bad circumstances–he was nowhere–and he got assigned a Blade Runner job in Moscow, and it was all Russian, and cold, and snow … John le Carré, you know? That’s what I was thinking of. I remember telling Ridley that, “Harrison in Moscow!” Just that’s a good thing, right? And he said [shrugs] and nothing came of it.

It makes total sense that Fancher’s first thought for a sequel would be a kind of Cold War-ish setting, what with the whole Cold War thing going on in the real world at that time. They’d have traded rain for snow, noodles for borscht, and maybe Deckard would have gotten a cozy fur hat. As it stands now, with 2049, we’ve got a dystopian Los Angeles to look forward to.

Blade Runner 2049 hits theaters October 6.

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