Dystopia moves on from Belfast

The brilliant thing about dystopias is that they tend to be big-budget — on screen, at least. So champagne corks must have been popping when Northern Ireland Screen announced last October that Amazon Studios would film Blade Runner 2099 in Belfast.

Hosting and helping to create the latest iteration of the Blade Runner hellscape would have generated valuable employment for the freelance crew and supply chain business owners who sustain the entertainment industry, yet are often on the wrong end of the transience to which it is prone.

Alas, on Thursday it was confirmed that production of the 10-part series, initially delayed as a result of the now-resolved Hollywood writers’ strike, will no longer go ahead in the North.

If Blade Runner 2099 is still destined to be made — its fate is unclear — then its neo-noir vision of a future in which synthetic humans have been bio-engineered to work on space colonies will have to be depicted without Belfast’s help.

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The sequel to the 1982 cult classic — an adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — and its 2017 follow-up Blade Runner 2049 was to have been filmed on location in the city and based in Belfast Harbour Studios.

Preparatory work had begun, with BBC News NI reporting that the £1.5 million (€1.7 million) spent to date by Northern Ireland Screen to bring the production to the city will now be recouped.

Some £4.1 million had been allocated by the screen development agency to the project, the relocation of which has left it “extremely disappointed”, according to chief executive Richard Williams. The organisation will now “do everything it can” to plug the gap in the region’s production schedule and provide work to people who had been relying on it.

Blade Runner was originally a commercial flop. The 2017 sequel also underperformed at the box office. Without even making it to the screen, Blade Runner 2099 has now completed a trilogy of sorts, serving as a reminder of the volatility and competitiveness of an industry that is fraught with risk. Investors in unfinished studio projects across Ireland will surely be taking note.