Still, since Blade Runner came out when the Soviet Union was still looming large, it would have been interesting to see how the Cold War feud between the U.S. and the Soviet Union had progressed decades into the future of this neo-noir world.
Nothing ever surfaced from an immediate follow-up, though, because of “legal problems.”
During an interview with Collider, Hampton Fancher, who also co-wrote Blade Runner 2049, talked about how within the year following Blade Runner’s completion, he and director Ridley Scott started kicking around ideas for a sequel, one of which was moving from the dystopic United States to the equally depressing Russia.
Not to mention that thrusting Rick Deckard into a Russian-based Spy Who Came in from the Cold-type of story would have been a good way to show if the situation with the Replicants was any different in (at the time) the world’s other biggest superpower compared to the United States.