One of the best sci-fi films of the last decade, Blade Runner 2049, is now streaming on Netflix. The film arrived on the streaming platform on Saturday. Directed by Dune‘s Denis Villeneuve and written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, the 2017 film is the sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner. The film stars Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Carla Juri, Lennie James, Dave Bautista, and Jared Leto. Ford reprised his role of Rick Deckard from Blade Runner for the sequel. Scott also returned as a producer on the film.
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Blade Runner 2049 follows Gosling’s K, a Nexus-9 replicant who works for the Los Angeles Police Department as a blade runner — an officer who hunts and retires (aka kills) rogue replicants. However, during the course of one of his assignments discovers evidence of a replicant who carried and gave birth to a child, something that is supposedly impossible. K is ordered to find and kill the child because its existence could upend society and civilization as they know it. K’s investigation leads him not only to question his own existence, but also leads him to Ford’s Deckard.
Blade Runner 2049 opened in theaters in October 2017 and while the film underperformed at the box office — bringing in $259.3 million worldwide on a production budget of $150 to 185 million — the film was met with wide critical acclaim which praised the film’s performances, direction, screenplay, effects, cinematography and faithfulness to Blade Runner. The film was also met with a positive response from audiences as well, despite its lackluster box office. The film ultimately was nominated for five Academy Awards — Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects. It won for Best Visual Effects. And despite the film being a box office disappointment and a follow up being unlikely, Villeneuve even said in 2020 that he’d be interested in returning to the Blade Runner franchise, albeit with a story disconnected from both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049.
“It’s such an inspiring place, the Blade Runner world,” Villeneuve said at the time. “The problem I have is the word ‘sequel’. I think cinema needs original stories. But if you ask me if I’d like to revisit this universe in a different way, I can say yes. It would need to be a project on its own. Something disconnected from both other movies. A detective noir story set in the future… I wake up sometimes in the night dreaming about it.”
Blade Runner 2049 is now streaming on Netflix.
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