Harrison Ford is lining up to make a surprise return to the role of Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel, Twitchfilm reports. Ford is apparently in early talks to return as the replicant nemesis in Scott's forthcoming followup to his 1982 sci-fi classic. If the prediction turns out to be true, it would be even more of a shock than the news in March last year that the veteran British film-maker was to shoot a new Blade Runner film. Scott had dismissed rumours of another Blade Runner film for nearly three decades, and his producer Andrew Kosove denied suggestions Ford might be involved in the new film as recently as last August.

"Twitch has learned that Harrison Ford has entered into early talks to join the new Blade Runner," reports the US site. "While this is still very early stages and it is quite possible that things won't work out the obvious implication is that what we are looking at is not a reboot but a direct sequel to the original."

Based on the 1968 Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was not a hit at the time but has gathered plaudits over the years. Set in an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, Scott's movie is about a "blade runner", played by Ford, who is tasked with hunting down a gang of replicants (android outlaws) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony. The film-maker left the audience to decide whether Deckard himself is a replicant.

Negative criticism of the film was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of Scott's director's cut, which excised the original's voiceover and a pegged-on "happy ending". Dick never wrote a sequel to the book, so Scott will probably be aiming to produce an original story. Three follow-up novels by Dick's friend, KW Jeter, were written between 1995 and 2000 to try to resolve some of the differences between Blade Runner and its source novel, but they were poorly received.

Prior to working on Blade Runner 2, which may or may not be his next film, Scott will make his long-awaited return to science fiction with Prometheus, a film "set in the same universe" as Alien, his cult 1979 slasher in space. The film, which stars Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Guy Pearce and Idris Elba, opens in the UK on 1 June.