Have Your Say: May BLADE RUNNER 2 Turn Out Right?

Say of director Ridley Scott what you want, but decades ago the man made two science fiction films which turned out to be so great, so influential, that even today we can still everywhere see the waves they created. These two films were, of course, 1979's Alien and 1982's Blade Runner.

While Alien has had its share of sequels, cross-overs, and spin-offs (some of them awesome, many of them terrible), Blade Runner proved harder to turn into a franchise of sorts. For starters, the film wasn't the runaway financial success that Alien had been, with many critics and audiences giving it a lukewarm welcome upon its initial release.

But time has been incredibly kind to Blade Runner, or rather the film has wrestled time itself to the ground and beaten it to a pulp. It's hard to think of near-future dystopian worlds in film which haven't somehow been influenced by it. The creators of some of the most famous examples, like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, have openly acknowledged they were heavily inspired by Blade Runner.
And of course there is Paul W. S. Anderson Soldier, adapted from a Harlan Ellison story and famously rumored to take place in Blade Runner's universe.

Let's put that last one aside for a moment, for we now have a real honest-to-goodness sequel about to be shot: Blade Runner 2 is in production, with Canadian genius Denis Villeneuve as its director, and an increasingly killer cast attached.

Making a sequel so long after an iconic original seems a spectacularly bad idea, but George Miller proved last year with Mad Max: Fury Road that it's not impossible (just damn hard).
So... given the people involved, are we right in feeling cautiously optimistic? Or are we deluding ourselves?

Chime in, in the comments below, and HAVE YOUR SAY!