Kurt Russell’s little-known ‘Blade Runner’ sequel: “It’s one that was always painful”
When Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner hit theatres in 1982, it was famously a flop. The grim, futuristic world was a downer for anyone hoping for wildly fanciful science fiction, and the complexity of the narrative was a little too esoteric for those who thought of the genre as more of a wild romp than a cerebral slow burn. It was dismissed as a big-budget art movie and failed to earn back its budget.
Even after the film became a touchstone for future directors in the ensuing decades and one of the most lauded movies of the ‘80s, Scott still hasn’t gotten over the sting of that initial round of reviews. However, by the 2010s, he seemed to have overcome the trauma enough to produce a sequel, Blade Runner 2049. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, it suffered a similar box office fate to the first film but earned much more favourable reviews.
What many audiences don’t know, even die-hard fans of Blade Runner, is that there was a sequel long before Villeneuve’s. In 1998, Kurt Russell starred in Soldier, helmed by Event Horizon director Paul WS Anderson. The script was written by David Peoples, who had earned a co-writing credit on Blade Runner for rewriting Hampton Fancher’s original screenplay, and even though he hadn’t intended the movie to be set in the same world as Scott’s film, Anderson decided to make the connections explicit.
In the movie, Russell plays an emotionless, monosyllabic soldier left for dead on a waste planet when his training is deemed to be outdated. There, he meets a community of outcasts who face extermination from his former employers. The connections to Blade Runner are everywhere. One of the 1982 film’s famous flying cars, a Spinner, is shown on the junk planet, and it is implied that Russell’s character fought in the battles that Rutger Hauer’s character mentions in the first film during his tearful monologue in the rain.
Soldier was a flop, netting less than $15million off a $60million budget. Although it has attained cult status in recent years, it hasn’t become the mainstream classic that its predecessor did, largely because it just isn’t as good. Russell is excellent as always, but the story lacks the depth of Scott’s, and the world-building can’t hold a candle to it. Throw in some CGI that has aged terribly, and you have a recipe for a sci-fi mess with a passionate but very small group of defenders.
Peoples has made it clear over the years that he had nothing to do with the Blade Runner connections, even though being the screenwriter on both movies clearly gave Anderson credibility for making the argument.
In a 2024 interview, he revealed that he held off on watching the movie for decades because he knew how much of his original script had been changed. Written 15 years before Anderson got his hands on it, it was James Cameron’s The Terminator and not Blade Runner that had inspired the screenplay, and Peoples couldn’t face the results. “It’s one that was always painful,” he said, though he insisted that the director “did a brilliant job” overall with the unofficial follow-up to a sci-fi great.
