More Blade Runner sequels could follow the upcoming second film

Over the past few weeks, director Ridley Scott has made some interesting claims about the upcoming Prometheus sequel, including revealing it will be titled Alien: Paradise Lost, that two more films in the series will follow it, and that it will connect right back to Ripley and the original Alien design. Now, in an interview with Yahoo!, Scott took it a step further, revealing plot details about the film and why they chose that title.

“Have you ever read Paradise Lost, by Milton? In a funny kind of way, it’s an interesting basis for the darkness of [Prometheus 2]. Where the good-looking guy, who is evil as s–t, gets all the girls and goes to the nightclubs. The other guy, who is not quite as good-looking, is boring as hell and stays home. So in a funny kind of way, we used that as the basis for it, it’ll be Alien: Paradise Lost. Which is very spooky, because it continues after the last one, where Elizabeth Shaw [Noomi Rapace] says, ‘I wanna go where they came from.’ And you’ve got Michael Fassbender in two parts, so she’ll slowly put him back together. They will go to the world of the Engineer…That’s where they’re going to go. They will find out who would design such an awful bio-mechanoid creature, like a massive piece of bacteria.”

Switching gears, the subject of the upcoming Blade Runner sequel came up wherein Scott implied that, like Prometheus, there’s potential for more films to follow.

“Everyone else is, so why not? I love to work. The French say “Work to live,” and I live to work. I’m very lucky to have a job that I adore. All my kids do the same thing. Some of it’s trying, but it’s like being in professional sport. It’s so competitive [that] you better keep bouncing the ball. You can’t rest.”

Scott went on to talk about Harrison Ford’s reaction to the script saying:

“Harrison said, ‘Mehh,’ and I said, ‘No, read this.’ And I think he said, ‘This is the best script I’ve ever had.’ We’ve been working on it for a couple of years.”

The director also went on to echo his belief that Ford’s Deckard was a Replicant in the first film and teased how he could have survived into the next film.

“Of course he’s a bloody Replicant! He’s going to have to admit it…You’ll have to see the story. It’ll all make sense.”

Scott also revealed the setting, which lines up to the release of the original film and the present day.

“It was 2017, so coming back it’ll be 2047, roughly. As young as you can play Ryan Gosling. He’s 34, but he looks 27 when he’s doing his push-ups. So maybe 2050.”

The Blade Runner sequel is scheduled to start principal photography in summer of 2016. Hampton Fancher (co-writer of the original) and Michael Green have written the original screenplay based on an idea by Fancher and Ridley Scott with the story taking place several decades after the conclusion of the 1982 original. Dennis Villeneuve will direct the film with frequent collaborator Roger Deakins working as director of photography.

Production on Alien: Paradise Lost is set to begin production in early 2016, with Michael Fassbender and Noomi Rapace set to reprise their roles of Shaw and the android David, respectively.