Why ‘Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human’ was never made into a movie
There’s an entire Blade Runner universe these days, something Philip K. Dick couldn’t have imagined when his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was first published, but it took a long time for Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi classic to begin its expansion.
35 years later, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 was released after escaping decades in development hell, only for the acclaimed epic to underperform at the box office, which has realistically ended any hopes of a third instalment when studio Warner Bros will be reticent of spending so much on the follow-up to a follow-up that echoed its predecessor by winning rave reviews while falling short in ticket sales.
Still, episodic series Blade Runner 2099 remains in the works, while the animated Blade Runner: Black Lotus has already been released, as have short films Blade Runner Black Out 2022, 2036: Nexus Dawn, and 2048: Nowhere to Run, as well as virtual reality video game Blade Runner: Revelations and its in-development spiritual successor Blade Runner 2033: Labyrinth.
The point is, there’s an entire franchise of Blade Runner content out there for the world to enjoy, but building out the world of replicants and their pursuers hasn’t come easy. Not even the literary sequels to Dick’s original story could make the jump from page to screen, although it wasn’t from a lack of trying.
K. W. Jeter – a close personal friend of the original author – penned Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human, which was published in 1995 and followed Deckard several months after the events of the movie, where he was living in isolation outside of Los Angeles. Once again, he’s tasked to hunt down a replicant with the promise of technology that allows Rachael to extend her lifespan as a reward, while the real-life person behind Roy Batty hires a blade runner of his own to track down Deckard, who he believes to be replicant.
It was followed by Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night and Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon, and with so much material to choose from, it was inevitable an adaptation would be floated in Hollywood’s corridors of power. Sure enough, screenwriter Stuart Hazeldine was hired to adapt Jeter’s first novel into a script renamed Blade Runner Down in 1998, which never made much further than the starting line.
However, when Alcon Entertainment purchased the rights to Blade Runner in 2011, any plans to adapt pre-existing stories were dropped in favour of a completely clean creative slate that was only beholden to Scott’s classic original. From there, Blade Runner 2049 emerged as its own tale that didn’t have to recreate plot points that were already on the page, giving the filmmaker the creative freedom to mount a phenomenal sequel that stands on its own two feet.
