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April 10 Is A Significant Date In The Blade Runner Timeline

By Tim Karan

The good news is that the future didn't turn out to be quite as bleak as Blade Runner predicted. The bad news is that it's just bleak in different ways.

As The Hollywood Reporter points out, today marks an important date in the mythology laid out in Ridley Scott's 1982 neo-noir sci-fi classic. But you would really need to be a die-hard fan to have noticed.

The original movie is set in Los Angeles in 2019, but at the beginning of the flick, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is on assignment to "retire" a replicant named Leon Kowalski (the late Brion James). When we see Kowalski's information, it reveals that his "incept" date is April 10, 2017. Replicants are engineered to have a lifespan of just four years, but Leon is only 2 years old when we meet him.

However, Leon gives the "terrible twos" a whole new meaning, as he violently escapes during an interrogation about his mother, which lets us know that replicants are capable of murder. He's the first we see given the Voight-Kampff test, which helps authorities determine if someone is a replicant. That's when things go bad. He soon meets his demise at the hands of another replicant while attempting to kill Deckard.

Blade Runner 2049, the upcoming sequel is obviously set in 2049 (35 years after the original), and it will see Ford back as Deckard with Ryan Gosling aboard as an investigator looking for him. Jared Leto is also in the movie, and Edward James Olmos confirmed that he'll return as Gaff.

The sequel will be released Oct. 6. Meanwhile, take a look at how it can fix what the first movie got wrong.

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