Ridley Scott is no longer directing the long-gestating Blade Runner sequel. Scott, 76, revealed the news in an interview with Variety to promote his biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings. While Blade Runner 2 is expected to move into production within the next year, Scott will now take a producer’s role.

Scott’s production company, Alcon Entertainment, revealed in August 2011 that Scott would be directing, then a year later confirmed that the British film-maker would be teaming up with original Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher to revisit. But last year it was announced Fancher’s script was to get a rejig from Michael Green, the author of critically-panned comic book movies Fantastic Four and The Green Lantern.

Scott has also now said that Harrison Ford’s character, blade runner Rick Deckard, will not appear until the new movie’s denouement. “Harrison is very much part of this one, but really it’s about finding him; he comes in in the third act,” he told Variety. “It makes sense in terms of how it relates to the first one.”

Ridley Scott on set in 2007. Photograph: Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images

The idea of a sequel to Blade Runner in which new, presumably younger, figures set out in search of the original movie’s central protagonist specifically recalls the plot of another belated sequel to a sci fi cult classic, 2010’s poorly received Tron Legacy. There have also been rumours that the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, follows a similar pattern.

Based on Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner was not a box office or critical hit in 1982, but has gathered plaudits over the years and been cited as one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. Negative initial critical opinion of the movie was largely reversed with the arrival in 1992 of a director’s cut, in which Scott excised the original’s studio-commissioned Harrison Ford voiceover as well as a pegged-on “happy ending”, which the film-maker is said to have hated.

In an overpopulated future Los Angeles that never sees the sunlight, Deckard is tasked with taking out a gang of replicants (android outlaws) who have escaped to Earth from an off-world colony. The sequel is likely to address the issue of whether Deckard himself is also a replicant.