As SNL brings its summer Weekend Update to a close, we have our first official Season 43 host. Hide your replicants, as Blade Runner 2049 star and returning guest Ryan Gosling will host the late September premiere, joined by an iconic New York musical guest.
As they often do when a much-beloved film property gets revived after decades spent dormant, fans have had plenty of cause to fret while Blade Runner 2049 has neared its release. Will there be a voiceover? (No.) Will the film definitively answer the question of whether Deckard is a replicant? (Also no.) Will the soundtrack rule? (It certainly seems that way.) And yet so many questions still remain in advance of the film’s wide release. Today will resolve one big one, however, and assuage quite a few fan worries with it.
The latest trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is full of new dialogue and sequences that reveal plenty of new details about the sequel, but even if you watched this trailer on mute it’s a beauty. (But actually don’t watch it with the sound off because Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score is like synth porn for the ears.)
Ryan Gosling is about to play himself. (In the DJ Khaled sense, not the Being John Malkovich sense.) The actor’s been on something of a roll recently, scoring critical plaudits for The Nice Guys and La La Land last year — the latter of which ended up a surprise blockbuster and less-surprise Oscar hoarder — and continuing on into 2017 with this past spring’s Song to Song. He’s got Blade Runner 2049 on the docket for this fall, a likely smash that may earn him admiration among nerd circles, the last niche demographic he has not yet charmed. But with the world at his feet, Gosling’s now making moves to dash all the goodwill he’s recently built up.
Have a week, Patty Jenkins. With Wonder Woman already a big hit with critics and a global blockbuster in the making — early projections suggest the film could earn as much as $95 million domestically in its opening weekend — now is the perfect time for Jenkins to start blowing the dust off some of the films she couldn’t get made before she was a big-time superhero director. And although one such project may sound like it belongs in the DC Cinematic Universe, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. To hear her say it, Jenkins might finally be teaming with Ryan Gosling to get one of her biggest passion projects off the ground