Blade Runner 2049: all the latest news, commentary, and trailers – The Verge

How Blade Runner got its name from a dystopian book about health care

2019-11-01T09:58:10-04:00

As of November 2019, we've officially caught up with Blade Runner's dystopian future. But we're already ten years past the very different book that inspired its name.

Most fans of Ridley Scott's 1982 film are aware that it's based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, and that the book is not called Blade Runner. If you pick up Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, you'll notice the term never appears in it. Even in the movie, "blade runner" is a slick but random name for mercenaries who hunt replicants. But it isn't meaningless. Blade Runner's remarkably weird title has its own backstory, which has nothing to do with androids, bounty …

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The VFX reel for Blade Runner 2049 shows how Denis Villeneuve brought his dystopian world to life

2017-12-24T09:25:04-05:00

Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner famously relied on elaborate miniatures to bring its futuristic Los Angeles to life, and helped define a cinematic look for dystopian sci-fi worlds. While Denis Villeneuve also used a number of miniatures to achieve the same effect in his sequel Blade Runner 2049, quite a few of the shots were enhanced with digital imagery.

Montreal-based Rodeo FX recently released a visual effects reel that highlighted its work on the film. Some of the film's big, environmental shots were completely digital, but there's other instances of where the production enhanced used practical locations with some CGI.

The studio …

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In Blade Runner 2049, can a relationship with a hologram be meaningful?

2017-10-29T09:00:02-04:00

In conventional love stories, boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, girl falls for boy, and some pivotal plot point happens. Unless there's a sequel, we assume that afterward, they live happily and inconsequentially ever after. But, what if in the future, it's boy designs girl? In Blade Runner 2049, Officer K (Ryan Gosling) lives with his AI hologram companion Joi, who was manufactured by Wallace Corp and tailored as the perfect companion. Her product tagline is, "Everything you want to see. Everything you want to hear."

Spoilers ahead for Blade Runner 2049.

Screenwriter Michael Green told The Thrillist, "I knew we'd be telling the story of …

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How makeup designer Donald Mowat helped shape Blade Runner 2049’s future

2017-10-27T08:00:02-04:00

Most people haven't heard of Donald Mowat, but they've likely seen his work in films like The Fighter, 8 Mile, The Departed, the James Bond films Skyfall and Spectre, and now, Blade Runner 2049. Mowat is a longtime makeup designer whose work has earned a Primetime Emmy, a Saturn Award, two Hollywood Makeup Artists Guild awards, and two Gemini Awards. He was recently nominated for a BAFTA award for his work on Tom Ford's Nocturnal Animals. Mowat has worked with director Denis Villeneuve multiple times, on Prisoners and Sicario, and he most recently partnered with Villeneuve again on the sequel to 1982's Blade Runner. Though critics have large …

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Blade Runner 2049 and Tron: Legacy have a surprising number of things in common

2017-10-18T11:11:58-04:00

The summer of 1982 was an extended cinematic Christmas for science fiction, horror, and fantasy fans. Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial dominated the summer's box office, and the canon of classic genre movies added many more entries that summer, with Conan the Barbarian and George Miller's The Road Warrior in May, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and John Carpenter's The Thing in June. But right around the July 4 holiday that year, two visually groundbreaking science fiction films were released to mild box-office returns, unremarkable reviews, and eventually passionate fanbases: Blade Runner and Tron.

Both Blade Runner and T …

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Question Club: Was Blade Runner 2049 worth the 35-year wait?

2017-10-10T09:34:47-04:00

This past weekend, Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 arrived in theaters. It is, in many ways, the most improbable of sequels, following a cult sci-fi film 35 years after the original flamed out at the box office. Yet the movie has been universally praised as a creative success, racking up some of the most impressive reviews of the year. It's an ambitious, visually decadent film, and one that's captivating despite a nearly three-hour run time.

But a 35-year wait brings with it a lot of expectations - particularly when you're talking about a film that arguably never really begged for a sequel in the first place. Given that Villeneuve hews …

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Blade Runner’s source material says more about modern politics than the movie does

2017-10-05T14:45:11-04:00

Significant spoilers ahead for the 1982 Blade Runner and its 1968 source material.

Ridley Scott's original 1982 film Blade Runner has been so visually influential that its special effects still look state of the art, in spite of the clunky analog computers and the women's goofy 1980s helmet-hair and enormous '80s shoulder pads. Scott's smoky, run-down retro-noir setting, full of ceiling fans, rusting clunky future-tech, and ramshackle Asian marketplaces, has been spliced into the DNA of tomorrow. It's influenced the visual style of everything from the 2013 hit Pacific Rim to the despised 2017 Ghost in the Shell, and on to the long-awaited s …

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Do not watch this final Blade Runner 2049 trailer

2017-10-03T17:44:00-04:00

The team behind Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 has done an excellent job of not revealing to audiences what Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is actually about. Sure, everybody knows Harrison Ford is back, and Ryan Gosling and Jared Leto are in it, and replicants are involved in some way, shape, or form. But other than that, it's pretty much been radio silence - so much so that we decided to make our initial review a totally spoiler-free zone.

So I was a little surprised to see this latest trailer, which… spoils some things. And not in a minor, Oh now I can infer what this person wants from a plot perspective kind of way. (Although …

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Blade Runner 2049: our spoiler-free review

2017-09-29T09:08:19-04:00

It's been 35 years since Ridley Scott's Blade Runner hit theaters, and when it takes this long for a sequel to roll around, a few questions need to be answered. No question is more important than "why?" Yes, we're in a cultural moment where nearly everything is a sequel, prequel, reboot, or spinoff, but Scott's dystopian film never organically called for a follow-up the way some films do. It's a neo-noir thriller with an open ending, but from a character and thematic perspective, Scott neatly sewed up the story. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), an android hunter known as a "blade runner," learns that all life has some sort of value. Tired of ki …

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A second prequel short introduces a new character from Blade Runner 2049

2017-09-14T16:29:27-04:00

Blade Runner 2049 is still a few weeks away, but fans will be able to get another look at the sequel with the release of the second of three short film prequels over at the iTunes Trailers site, via Polygon, and on YouTube.

Titled 2048: Nowhere to Run, this second prequel is set 12 years after the first short film, 2036: Nexus Dawn that was released a few weeks ago, and - as the name suggests - just a year before the upcoming Blade Runner 2049.

'2048: Nowhere to Run' is set just a year before the upcoming 'Blade Runner' sequel

The new short puts the spotlight on Dave Bautista's character, Sapper. In Nowhere to Run, we see him making his way …

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