‘Blade Runner’ Universe to Expand With More Novels

By Dave McNary

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – Alcon Media Group and Titan Publishing are partnering on a new co-publishing venture initially focused on the “Blade Runner” universe.

Entertainment produced “Blade Runner 2049,” which was released in October and produced by Alcon co-CEOs Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, along with Bud Yorkin and Cynthia Yorkin. The film earned $259.2 million worldwide.

Johnson, Kosove, and Titan’s co-founders, Nick Landau and Vivian Cheung, said the companies will develop and publish a variety of both fiction and non-fiction print media with comics and graphic novels that dive deeper into the “Blade Runner” world as well as a variety of publications focused on the visual and technical sides of the production process.

Editorial duties will be handled by Titan’s David Manley-Leach and Alcon’s director of publishing Jeff Conner.

Kosove and Johnson said, “In partnering with the exceptional Titan Comics and Titan Books, we’re confident that the world of ‘Blade Runner’ will continue to organically grow in a way that refuses to sacrifice the quality, tone, and high standards of this beloved property.”

“We are extremely excited to be publishing ‘Blade Runner’ comics and illustrated books,” Landau and Cheung said. “The ‘Blade Runner’ universe has barely been explored; there is so much more there. It’s an honour to be bringing this world to life in new ways for a new audience — and to reveal tales from that universe that you’ve never seen before.”

Titan has handled “Doctor Who” publications (comics, magazines, and books) and tie-in novels set in the Marvel and DC universes, along with a line of original genre novels, including hardboiled crime, supernatural horror, cyberpunk, and intergalactic adventure.

Denis Villeneuve’s “,” starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, was set in a drought-stricken post-apocalyptic world. Ridley Scott directed the original, which was set in a rainy dystopian version of Los Angeles in 2019 and followed Ford’s Rick Deckard as he pursued four replicants who had escaped from an off-world colony.

The sequel was written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, and succeeded the initial story by Fancher and David Peoples, based on Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”