Blade Runner 2049: Plot, Cast, Production & Music

By , Founder & Editor, covering Alien vs. Predator since 2001

Blade Runner 2049 is a science fiction film directed by Denis Villeneuve. Hampton Fancher and Michael Green wrote the screenplay from a story by Fancher, thirty years after Ridley Scott's 1982 film. In 2049 Los Angeles, Nexus-9 blade runner Officer K finds buried proof that a replicant gave birth. The case leads him to the Wallace Corporation, Las Vegas, and Rick Deckard. Warner Bros. opened it in North America on 6 October 2017, and Sony handled the rest of the world.

Plot Summary

In 2049, bioengineered replicants did the hard labor on Earth and off-world. Officer K, serial KD6-3.7, was a Nexus-9 blade runner for the Los Angeles police. He knew he was a replicant, and after each retirement he sat a baseline test built from lines in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. The test checked whether those killings had thrown his responses off the approved line, because a Nexus-9 who failed it could be retired himself.

K flew an unmarked spinner over the solar fields of the California Grapevine to a 220-acre protein farm on the edge of the megacity. There he retired Sapper Morton, a Nexus-8 listed as model NK680514i and wanted for crimes after years living off the grid. Sapper had served in the military on Calantha, then settled on Earth and grew Wallace's high-protein nematodes, short white worms farmed in dirt pools under plastic tents. He also grew garlic and flowers for himself and kept an antique piano, luxuries a replicant was not supposed to need.

The two generations fought in the farmhouse, and K overpowered the older combat model, then scanned the serial burned into the bottom of Sapper's right eye. Before he died, Sapper treated the Nexus-9 line as units that had never seen a miracle. Under a dead tree K dug up a box of bones Sapper had hidden, the remains of a female replicant who had died in a caesarean birth, something the later models were not supposed to be able to do.

At the Los Angeles police morgue, forensics technician Coco read the bones and confirmed the birth. Lieutenant Joshi treated that secret as something that could start a war between humans and replicants. She ordered K to find the child and retire it, then wipe the rest of the file. K ran the DNA through the department's analog Denabase, an electromagnetic-pulse-proof cabinet of hard copies that replaced networked records after the blackout.

At the Wallace archives K walked the Records Library with a file clerk and pulled older data from the Memory Vault, a cold room of glass Memory Bearings that held pre-blackout video. The dead woman was identified as an experimental Nexus-7 named Rachael, tied to former blade runner Rick Deckard. Niander Wallace had bought what was left of Tyrell after the company went bankrupt in the late 2020s. He could grow obedient Nexus-9s and the protein that fed the planet, but he could not make them breed, and that blocked the scale of off-world labor he wanted. In the creche he inspected a newborn female replicant, then killed her when she could not give him that missing function, and he sent his enforcer Luv to watch K's case.

Back at the farm K found the date 6.10.21 cut into the tree, a mark that matched a childhood memory of hiding a wooden horse from older boys. Replicant memories were supposed to be implants, so his holographic companion Joi, a Wallace Digital Companion installed in his government flat, treated the matching date as evidence that he might have been born. Police records showed two children born on that date with the same DNA, listed as opposite sexes, and a girl who had died of a genetic illness.

The search for the boy took K past the city and into the Trash Mesa, the flooded suburbs toward San Diego that Los Angeles had turned into a dump. Scavengers who broke down wrecked ships attacked his spinner among the hulls. He reached an orphanage built inside an overturned satellite dish, where abandoned children sorted computer waste under a man named Mr. Cotton. The year's papers were gone, but the rooms matched the memory, and the wooden horse was in the furnace where he remembered putting it.

Memory designer Ana Stelline lived behind glass in a sealed lab overlooking the ocean and built the childhoods Wallace put into new Nexus-9s. She had been isolated since she was about eight, after a weak immune system put her in that room. She confirmed that the orphanage memory had been lived by someone, not written as fiction, and K concluded that he was the child. He then failed a baseline, reported the child dead to Joshi, and received two days to pass the test or be retired himself.

Joi began calling him Joe, and he visited Gaff in a care home, where Gaff left him a wooden sheep. Joi then hired the pleasure model Mariette, a Doxie working with a replicant underground, so the two of them could share a body with K for a night. In the morning Mariette left a tracker in his coat, and a street analyst named Doc Badger read radiation in the horse that pointed to the ruins of Las Vegas, emptied by a dirty bomb years earlier.

K found Deckard in the empty Vintage Casino with a dog, scavenged books, hydroponic grow pods, and old casino holograms of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra. Deckard had hidden there after Rachael died in childbirth. He had helped scramble the birth record so the child could not be found through him, and he had never learned whether that child was a boy or a girl. The two of them fought through a damaged hologram show before Deckard let K stay.

Luv killed the file clerk and Coco when she took the bones for Wallace, then killed Joshi in her office. She followed K to Vegas, smashed Joi's portable emanator, and took Deckard. The replicant underground pulled K out of the wreck. Their leader Freysa had been present at the birth and confirmed that the girl had lived. The wooden-horse memory was Stelline's, so K was not the child. Freysa wanted Deckard killed so Wallace could not force the daughter's name out of him.

Wallace then offered Deckard a new Rachael grown from the old file. Deckard refused her because the eyes were the wrong color, and Luv destroyed that copy and put him on a spinner for an off-world interrogation. On the way back through the city a giant Joi advertisement spoke to K as if he were any other customer. He intercepted Luv's convoy at the Sepulveda Sea Wall in a storm and drowned her, taking a wound in the fight. He then drove Deckard to Stelline's lab and left the wooden horse with him. Deckard went inside and met his daughter through the glass, and K died on the front steps in the snow.

Main Cast And Characters

Villeneuve wanted lesser-known faces around Harrison Ford, with Ryan Gosling as the new lead. Fancher had named Gosling for K years before the shoot, when Ridley Scott was still attached, and Ford came back as Deckard after Scott sent him the script.

  • Officer K / KD6-3.7 (Ryan Gosling) was a Nexus-9 blade runner who lived in a government apartment with the hologram Joi. He spent the film hunting a replicant-born child, then learned the childhood memory was not his, and died after bringing Deckard to Stelline.
  • Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) was the blade runner from the 1982 film. He had hidden in ruined Las Vegas after Rachael died, kept a dog, and met his daughter at Stelline's lab.
  • Joi (Ana de Armas) was a Wallace holographic companion installed in K's apartment. A portable emanator let her leave the flat. Luv destroyed that unit in Las Vegas.
  • Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) was Wallace's Nexus-9 enforcer. She killed Joshi, took Deckard, and died at the sea wall when K drowned her.
  • Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) ran K's unit at the Los Angeles police. She ordered the child retired to keep the birth quiet, and Luv killed her in her office.
  • Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) ran the Wallace Corporation after Tyrell's collapse. He was blind, used drone sight, and wanted replicant reproduction for off-world labor.
  • Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri) designed replicant memories from a sealed lab. She was Rachael and Deckard's daughter, living with a weak immune system behind glass.
  • Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) was a Nexus-8 combat model turned protein farmer. He had hidden the birth and died when K retired him.
  • Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) was a replicant pleasure model who synced with Joi, then marked K for Freysa's group.
  • Freysa (Hiam Abbass) led the replicant underground. She had been present at the birth and later told K that the girl had lived.
  • Mr. Cotton (Lennie James) ran the satellite-dish orphanage on the Trash Mesa and put the children to work sorting scrap.
  • Doc Badger (Barkhad Abdi) scanned objects for origin and read the horse's radiation that sent K to Las Vegas.
  • Coco (David Dastmalchian) was the police mortician who confirmed the birth from Sapper's buried bones. Luv killed him when she took those remains.
  • Gaff (Edward James Olmos) returned for a short visit in a care home and left K a wooden sheep.
  • Rachael (Sean Young) appeared in 1982 footage and as a Wallace copy built on Loren Peta with Young's likeness. The copy's eyes were the wrong color, and Deckard refused her.

Conflict With Blade Runner Sequel Books

K. W. Jeter wrote three authorized sequels to Ridley Scott's film rather than to Philip K. Dick's novel. The Dick estate licensed that line, and the books treat the November 2019 hunt, the four-year lifespan, and the missing sixth replicant as settled facts. They sit with Dick's book as Blade Runner Books. Millennium and Bantam Spectra issued the first of them in 1995, and Gollancz closed the set in 2000. 2049 does not continue those plots.

In The Edge of Human, Deckard hid Rachael in an Oregon cabin after the elevator. In August 2020 Sarah Tyrell, the human model for that replicant, pulled him back to Los Angeles to hunt the sixth replicant left when Mary was cut from the film. Dave Holden survived Leon's opening shot in that book, and a white-haired human who used Roy Batty's name closed on the same file.

Replicant Night sent Deckard and Sarah off Earth as Mr. and Mrs. Niemand. Director Urbenton paid Deckard to advise an orbital restaging of the November hunt, and a child named Rachael woke inside the wreck of Salander 3. Eye and Talon later put blade runner Iris Knaught after Eldon Tyrell's living owl, Scrappy, and ended in a desert lab where Deckard waited with that child.

Deckard hid in ruined Las Vegas after Rachael died in childbirth, not in an Oregon cabin with a living Rachael. The child is Ana Stelline, a memory designer sealed behind glass, not a girl named Rachael who slept in Salander 3 and later stood with Deckard in a desert lab. Niander Wallace bought what was left of Tyrell after a late-2020s bankruptcy, and the film never brings back Sarah Tyrell, Holden after the opening shooting, Urbenton, or Iris Knaught's owl hunt.

Prequel Short Films

Three shorts filled the years between November 2019 and the 2049 hunt. They were released online in the weeks before the feature and treat the blackout, the return of legal replicants, and Sapper's years on the farm as the same timeline.

Black Out 2022

Shinichirō Watanabe directed the anime short Blade Runner Black Out 2022. A replicant named Iggy set off an electromagnetic pulse over Los Angeles that wiped Tyrell's registry of who was human and who was not. That blackout is why so many later files are missing in the feature. Edward James Olmos appears as Gaff, and Flying Lotus wrote the score.

2036: Nexus Dawn

Luke Scott directed 2036: Nexus Dawn. Niander Wallace presented a Nexus-9 to lawmakers after the post-blackout ban on replicants. He had the unit kill itself on command to show that the new line would obey. Benedict Wong sat among the officials who heard that pitch. That hearing is why K's generation is legal on Earth in 2049.

2048: Nowhere To Run

Luke Scott also directed 2048: Nowhere to Run. Dave Bautista played Sapper Morton a year before K reached the farm. Sapper sold protein in the city, then showed what a Nexus-8 could do when a mother and her child were attacked in the street. The fight outed him as a replicant and put him back on the police list that K later used.

Development

Yorkin Rights

After the 1982 release, Bud Yorkin and Jerry Perenchio held the sequel rights and did not want another film. Tanya Lapointe's making-of book records Cynthia Yorkin saying there was no interest for years, then she and Bud began talking about a sequel or prequel once the Director's Cut and Final Cut had rebuilt the audience. Untangling the rights took about seven years. A television series was weighed and dropped. They took the project to Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson at Alcon Entertainment after that company had a strong run that included The Blind Side.

In 2011 Kosove left word for Ridley Scott, who was then shooting Prometheus. Scott asked them to London within fifteen minutes. He had wanted another Blade Runner story since the 1980s, with prequels and sequels in mind, but the rights had never been free. Alcon's deal blocked a remake of the 1982 film and opened the door to a sequel.

Fancher And Green

Scott called Hampton Fancher the same year and asked if he had a sequel idea. Fancher had just finished a short story and read him the first paragraph. Scott brought him to London, and within a year they had an 85-page treatment written in Fancher's dialogue style. The new plot grew out of Tyrell's old ambition rather than another escaped-Nexus hunt. Scott wanted a character story that would not tour the off-world colonies or explain how replicants were built. Broderick Johnson later put the shift in simple terms: the first film was about how many years a replicant had left, and the sequel was about what those years were worth.

The opening farm was older than the sequel. In 1980 Scott asked Fancher what Deckard had retired before the Nexus-6 case, then described soup boiling on a stove at a ramshackle farmstead with a dead tree. Fancher wrote that visit as the start of the first film, Scott cut it because it did not lock into the rest of the hunt, and Fancher published a short story from the same scene, "The Shape of the Final Dog," in 2012. Villeneuve put the farm back as the first sequence of 2049, with K in Deckard's place.

Michael Green was hired in 2013 to turn the treatment into a screenplay. He spent time with Scott going over the 1982 film, then added more plot turns than that investigation, on the view that later audiences could hold a thicker case. Green also treated the setting as an alternate world rather than a ruined version of 2017, which let the writers drop the internet and keep print photographs and analog machines. The finished credits give Fancher the story and Fancher and Green the screenplay. Scott later stepped off the director's chair when Alien: Covenant filled his calendar, and he stayed as an executive producer.

Denis Villeneuve

Harrison Ford signed on in 2014 and would not wait out Scott's next Alien films. Alcon took the script to Denis Villeneuve, who had made Prisoners for the same producers. Kosove remembered Villeneuve naming Blade Runner as his favorite film on a cold night of that earlier shoot. He later put an envelope marked Queensboro on the table and told him the name was a cover for the next Blade Runner. Villeneuve's condition was a meeting with Scott. Scott told him not to copy the first film too closely and to do his own version.

Villeneuve called cinematographer Roger Deakins, his partner on Prisoners and Sicario, and storyboard artist Sam Hudecki, who had already drawn four of his films. In the autumn of 2015, while Villeneuve was still cutting Arrival in Montreal, that group sat for weeks of drawing sessions with Deakins's wife James, executive producer Bill Carraro, storyboard artist Darryl Henley, and later production designer Dennis Gassner. Those two-to-four-hour sessions ran on for months, including weekends. Villeneuve wanted snow, a colder climate drawn from Montreal winters rather than Scott's London rain, and a city built taller on top of Syd Mead's old street level. Principal photography was set for Budapest.

Gassner had met Scott in 1980 at Zoetrope, when Scott came looking for neon while Gassner was assisting Dean Tavoularis on Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart. Scott took the warehouse stock for the first Blade Runner. Decades later Gassner designed the sequel's rooms. Ford came back after Scott sent him the script. Fancher had named Gosling for K years before the cameras rolled, when Scott was still attached, and Villeneuve kept that choice.

World Building

Villeneuve first tried to reason the thirty years after 2019 as a real calendar, then dropped that. Steve Jobs had not existed in Scott's film, and the Soviet Union had not fallen. In a New York hotel Fancher treated the first picture as a dream and pushed Villeneuve to work the same way. In the summer of 2015 a small concept group led by designer Aaron Haye started drawing before a locked script, and some of that work stayed in the finished city. Villeneuve also wrote a Rule Book for the sequel: Nexus-9s aged like people, arrived as grown infertile adults, and lived on Earth as a third-class labor force.

The climate was written as worse than 2019. Air and water were toxic, plants and animals were gone, and a wooden horse counted as a rare object. Rising seas had wrecked the California coast west of the Sepulveda Sea Wall, and people left on Earth crowded into megacities under smog that hid the sun. After an electromagnetic pulse shut machines down for ten days, digital files vanished and corporations went back to analog cabinets, cathode-ray screens, and printed photographs. Green invented that crash so the sequel could follow Scott's 1980s machines instead of 2017 gadgets. The producers and director also sat with doctors, architects, and engineers before the shoot and used those talks as a check on what the script assumed.

Production Design

Gassner asked Villeneuve for a single design word, and Villeneuve gave him brutality. Chaos was added next, and those two words were used on the sets, the spinners, and the clothes. Villeneuve called the look Post Neo-Brutalism. Mead's old rule that the street was the basement of the city stayed in place. Gassner's team then stacked thousands of new bunker-like towers over it, including three Wallace buildings designed as sea blades meant to stand for 10,000 years if the Pacific kept rising. An early sketch had those towers form a letter W. Villeneuve wanted a quieter outline than that.

Costume designer Renée April and Hudecki called the street clothes Urban Snow Trash, a mix of winter survival gear and synthetic fabrics instead of the first film's leather and wool. Villeneuve hand-picked about 2,500 extras and asked for mournful faces, using James Nachtwey's war photographs as a reference. Prop master Doug Harlocker and his team made about 200 different breathing masks, plus K's badge, LED identification, blaster, and a photo reader that echoed Deckard's Esper. Screens used milled acrylic bubbles over LEDs to fake the old curved cathode-ray glass. Advertising moved off static boards onto drones and smog, including a giant pink Joi figure that Deakins lit on set with a three-story LED wall of Ana de Armas.

Syd Mead came back to shape a Las Vegas emptied by a dirty bomb, a city Fancher had written as unsafe for decades. Villeneuve sent him a picture of Dubai as a starting point. Mead kept the Luxor pyramid and put a larger tripod over it, and he left a few other present-day landmarks as familiar points in a taller, emptier strip. Weta Workshop built large miniatures of Los Angeles, the Trash Mesa, and the Wallace towers, including a four-meter Wallace model at 1:1600, and Alex Funke shot them on digital motion-control rigs so digital extensions could start from real surfaces. The first object the art department designed was the spinner. Mead's aerodyne idea stayed, with a harsher body. Two versions of K's unmarked police spinner were built in the United Kingdom, one a battery car that could run about 50 miles per hour and one a flying shell with retractable wheels, and Luv, Deckard, and Wallace's guards had vehicles of their own.

Sets And Locations

Sapper's house and greenhouses were built from scratch on the Origo backlot, with a dead tree of polystyrene and real bark, and those farm scenes were shot in October and November. The Los Angeles street market was not in Fancher and Green's first draft, which had only a bar named Bibi's. Villeneuve added a pedestrian walk packed with vending machines, tuk-tuks, and up to 400 extras, then rained on that set for four days. K's tower was named Moebius Apartments, number 21, after Jean Giraud, whose The Long Tomorrow had fed the first film. The apartment was a government box with furniture that folded into the walls, a worn copy of Pale Fire on the table, and a ceiling arm that held Joi inside the flat until K bought a pocket emanator. The staircase was filmed in a Budapest school, and the snowstorm outside the front door was shot on a warm September night downtown.

The LAPD tower was a prefabricated mushroom over a carrier-style landing pad, and Weta built it as its largest miniature on the film, using forced perspective from 1:48 down to 1:72. Joshi's office was the first interior of principal photography, lit as a bright Hong Kong-style room rather than 1982 noir. Wallace's Records Library used one hundred twelve-foot cabinets with handwritten drawer labels, only one of which opened, then digital rows beyond the stage. His office sat over a practical koi pond three feet deep. Guests came up stairs that opened through the water, and Deakins hung a ring of 286 incandescent lamps as an artificial sun. Luv's office sat under that pond, so light from the water fell through her ceiling. The Nexus Reliquary tanks held 3D-printed bodies scanned from extras, because filling them would have added about 3,000 pounds of water each. Tanya Lapointe, Villeneuve's partner and a reporter on the shoot, followed those rooms for The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049.

The Trash Mesa mixed Weta ship miniatures, a full-scale Budapest backlot, and references to Edward Burtynsky's photographs of the Chittagong breaking yards and the Fukushima tsunami. The orphanage dish stood 29 feet high with a 125-foot inner span, took twenty carpenters and about ten weeks, and sat on 350 tons of wet earth with 300 children sorting a truckload of computer waste. Mr. Cotton's tanker interiors used the abandoned Inota Power Plant, a Stalin-era coal station an hour and a half from Budapest, with added boilers and fake lignite that could take a controlled fire. For Las Vegas, Kosove and Johnson drove Villeneuve across the Mojave in April 2016 before the shoot. The yellow desert came from a 2009 Sydney dust storm, and the Vintage Casino interiors were the old Budapest Stock Exchange, later the Hungarian television headquarters, cleaned and then aged again with dust. Deckard's rooms held a rebuilt 1982 blaster, four copies in all, a Wurlitzer that threw up Frank Sinatra, and hydroponic grow pods.

Casting

Ford had been unsure until he read the script, then accepted the part. Gosling took K after Villeneuve described snow in this Los Angeles, and it was Gosling's first time as the lead of a film this size. He had turned down superhero-scale pictures before this one. Scott had asked Fancher years earlier who should play K, and Fancher named Gosling. Gosling was on set every shooting day, including days he was not called.

Villeneuve first wanted David Bowie for Wallace. Bowie died in January 2016, days after that approach. Jared Leto had been asking Alcon for a part since 2014, not long after Dallas Buyers Club. He arrived in September 2016, wore opaque lenses, and stayed blind on set from morning to night, using a young blind consultant named Chris as a reference. Makeup designer Donald Mowat had an eye specialist in Los Angeles paint custom lenses and added a neck light for the Halo drones, Barracuda units that fed a picture into Wallace's skull. An earlier draft had given Wallace empty sockets from a congenital disease. Villeneuve changed that to blindness for the camera.

Sylvia Hoeks, who is Dutch as Rutger Hauer was, read Roy Batty's request for more life at her Luv audition. She treated Luv as about twelve years old emotionally, loyal to Wallace and dressed in clean Japanese-cut lines by Renée April. Ana de Armas spent months on English before Joi, then shot every apartment scene with Gosling rather than being added later as a separate plate. Visual-effects supervisor John Nelson filmed her with extra cameras so a faint back shell could hold her volume when she went transparent. Dave Bautista flew from Atlanta and was judged too young for the sixty-year-old Nexus on the page. Mowat aged him with stretch-and-stipple latex until people on set took him for an older man.

Villeneuve cast Mackenzie Davis early as Mariette, in part because she could pass as a younger sister to Daryl Hannah's Pris. Carla Juri played Stelline in a two-story, 360-degree concrete egg inspired by the Darwin Centre at London's Natural History Museum. First unit's first footage, on 1 July 2016, was Juri in a holographic forest shot at an old orphanage in Fót, ten minutes from the Hungarian stages, after the script's Costa Rican jungle proved hard to find near Budapest. Sean Young visited, and her face was put on Loren Peta for the Wallace copy of Rachael. Edward James Olmos came back as Gaff. Bud Yorkin died in August 2015, before the cameras rolled.

Principal Photography

Shooting began on 11 July 2016 at Korda and Origo in Budapest and ran about ninety-five days, into November. The crew worked across ten stages, backlot builds, and a million-gallon water tank. First assistant director Don Sparks counted greetings in eight or nine languages. Unit photographer Stephen Vaughan came out of retirement to shoot the set as he had in 1982. Inserts with Robin Wright and Sylvia Hoeks went first. Gosling's baseline scene was filmed on 14 July, day four. The script had him read a short Pale Fire passage, and he and vocal coach Natsuko Ohama built an eight-minute "dropping in" pass that tested every word in shifting contexts until the delivery went into a trance. Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker cut that longer take down to the percussive version in the finished film and treated the day as the shoot's own baseline.

Deakins shot on a single Arri Alexa XT Studio with Zeiss Master Prime lenses, mostly in a 1.55:1 frame, and refused a multi-camera setup. Los Angeles streets took cues from Beijing smog, Bangladeshi yards, and London brutalist blocks, and the Vegas orange came from dust-storm references in the Sahara and Sydney. Aerial plates of Mexico City stood in for the packed Los Angeles hills, and Ivanpah's desert solar farm fed the Grapevine fields under K's spinner. A subcontractor died in a fall while a set was being taken down at Origo. The production stayed on budget after adding a few days, and Gosling's press trip for Damien Chazelle's 2016 musical was fitted around his remaining scenes.

Joi and Mariette's merge was shot as a shared dance. De Armas and Davis repeated the same gestures in turn while Gosling held still, watching tablet playback so the two bodies would lock into a third face when the plates were stacked. The Vegas casino fight was planned for about four months. Villeneuve first cut a damaged version of Elvis Presley's 1970 "Suspicious Minds," Deakins designed the lighting to that track, Gosling and Ford fought on the practical lounge, and the holograms, including about fifty dancers, were shot last so they could fit around the actors. Walker later stripped a fourteen-piece music pile back down so the scene stayed a hunt rather than a revue. Special-effects supervisor Gerd Nefzer built a full-scale spinner on a hydraulic piston and lazy-Susan ring that flew into Deckard's penthouse window, turned, and landed, a move the crew watched as a real rig even when it looked like computer graphics.

The sea-wall finish was first booked for a tank in Malta. Executive producer Bill Carraro pushed to build a new tank eight minutes from the Budapest stages instead, with dump tanks, wave makers, and rain so the company would not have to move. That tank was ready on 6 October 2016 and was left for later Hungarian productions. Villeneuve directed from the water in a dry suit for about ten cold nights, using only the lights from K's spinner and Wallace's limousine. Heaters held the water near 78 to 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Nefzer's dump towers each held two buckets of two and a half tons, and a separate roller-coaster track plus air lifters kept the four-ton Wallace limousine moving with the waves instead of sitting still. Sylvia Hoeks trained for six months with martial-arts coach Chloé Bruce for the fight with K. The dump tanks were not dropped on the stunt performers, because a five-ton wave was too heavy to throw at them.

Music

Jóhann Jóhannsson was hired after scoring Villeneuve's Prisoners, Sicario, and Arrival. During the cut Villeneuve decided the picture needed something closer to Vangelis than to that earlier collaboration, and Jóhannsson left under a contract that kept him from talking about the split. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch joined in July 2017, late in post-production, and wrote a synth score that kept the 1982 palette without copying the old cues line for line.

The last cue under K's death is a rewritten "Tears in the Rain," the Vangelis piece that played when Roy Batty died on the Bradbury roof. In Las Vegas, Villeneuve and editor Joe Walker built the casino fight on a damaged cut of Elvis Presley's 1970 "Suspicious Minds," then reduced the hologram noise so Deckard and K stayed the center of the sequence. A Wurlitzer in Deckard's rooms threw up a hologram of Frank Sinatra singing "One for My Baby," with Stephen Triffitt copying a 1962 Royal Festival Hall performance. Epic released the soundtrack album beside the film.

Later Works

Blade Runner: Black Lotus is a 2021–22 anime set in 2032 Los Angeles, with Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama directing and Shinichirō Watanabe as creative director. It follows a female replicant and is not an adaptation of the 2017 feature. Amazon later announced a series titled Blade Runner 2099, with Scott attached as an executive producer.

Box Office And Reception

The film premiered at the Dolby Theatre on 3 October 2017 and opened in the United States on 6 October. Warner had looked for an opening near $43–47 million. Thursday previews took about $4 million, including $800,000 from IMAX, but Friday fell to $12.6 million. The weekend finished at about $31.5 million, first place for that frame and the largest opening Villeneuve or Gosling had then had. Worldwide it reached about $276.6 million against a $150–185 million budget. Alcon had put break-even near $400 million, and the first run fell short of that figure.

Reviews praised Villeneuve, Deakins, and the sets, and many noted that the sequel used the slower 1982 pace. The running time and the opening weekend were common complaints. At the 90th Academy Awards the film won cinematography for Deakins, his first Oscar after many nominations, and visual effects for John Nelson, Gerd Nefzer, Paul Lambert, and Richard R. Hoover. It had five Oscar nominations in all. BAFTA gave it cinematography and special visual effects from eight nominations.

Famous Quotes

The 2017 campaign sold Blade Runner 2049 with the line "The key to the future is finally unearthed." The film itself left short lines from K, Joi, Wallace, Deckard, and Sapper, plus the baseline fragment from Pale Fire.

  • Tagline: "The key to the future is finally unearthed."
  • Sapper Morton: "You newer models are happy scraping the shit, because you've never seen a miracle."
  • Joi: "I never travel, so I plan ahead."
  • Wallace: "Every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce."
  • Deckard: "I had your job once. I was good at it."
  • Freysa: "Dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do."
  • K: "All the best memories are hers."
  • Baseline fragment: "And blood-black nothingness began to spin. A system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem."

Is Deckard A Replicant?

Philip K. Dick's novel treats Deckard as a human hunter. Scott has said for years that the film Deckard is a replicant, and Ford has played him as a man. Villeneuve did not settle that argument in 2049. K is a replicant from the opening farm. Deckard has aged, hidden for decades, and fathered a child with Rachael. Wallace suggests someone may have designed Deckard to fall for Rachael so that birth could happen.

Gaff's wooden sheep does not name Deckard's make, and neither does Wallace's copy of Rachael. Villeneuve did not decide the question on screen. Scott continued to treat Deckard as a replicant after the sequel, and Ford and Fancher did not.

Conclusion

Blade Runner 2049 is Denis Villeneuve's 2017 Alcon and Warner sequel, written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green. It follows Officer K from Sapper Morton's farm to the sea wall, through Wallace's wish for a breeding replicant and Deckard's years in Las Vegas. The film ends with Deckard meeting Ana Stelline and with K dead in the snow outside her lab.

External Sources

Tag Categories: Blade Runner Lore | Blade Runner Movies