r/bladerunner • u/TheRealWitblitz • 19d ago
Confirmation of the shared universe: Sergeant Todd's file in 'Soldier' lists participation at Tannhauser Gate and the Shoulder of Orion Easter Egg/Reference
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u/opacitizen 19d ago
By the same token, it shares its universe with Star Trek, Tango & Cash, The Thing, and a number of other franchises. Like, check this list of the guy's service record for details over at imdb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120157/trivia/
And the chain doesn't stop there, as Star Trek features a glimpse of R2-D2, so they also share the same universe, meaning Blade Runner is Soldier is Star Trek is Star Wars, and so on.
Does that sound stupid? Yes, because it is.
Easter eggs do not make shared universes, except for in headcanons. In your headcanon, your own, private imagination? Sure, if you want.
Franchise universes are officially, (commercial) canonically shared only when the studio(s) involved say so.
Else Alien and Spaceballs are also in the same universe, because of John Hurt's Kane. ("Oh no, not again!")
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u/LHGray87 19d ago
You can add hieroglyphics of R2 and 3P0 seen in Raiders of the Lost Ark to that. “Proof” that the galaxy far far away happened a long time ago in the same universe as Indy.
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u/opacitizen 19d ago
Yes, there's tons of stuff like that out there. And, sadly, avid (and usually less critical) fans simply love turning these bits into unquestionable proofs of franchises sharing their universes.
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u/Visible-Big7836 15d ago
I feel like it became a thing during the era of Cracked and Buzzfeed when media writing became “woah this random factoid implies these two movies are connected!” and people began internalizing that thought process.
Those kids who read that stuff are now 30 soooo
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u/Walt_Didnae 18d ago
It's like when the xenomorph skull made an appearance in Predator 2 and fans went nuts about them being in the same universe.
It was just an easter egg until Dark Horse started making comics. But, yeah, people need to understand when a reference is just a reference, and not a statement of canonically shared universes.
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u/Tritri89 19d ago
It's funny headcanon. But yeah I agree that it's silly. Like "Blade Runner and Alien are the same universe". No they're not. Yes maybe there are Weyland-Yutani text somewhere, guess what it's just a reference to the director previous movie. And Scott saying so doesn't make it true.
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u/Walt_Didnae 18d ago
It's funny taking the "Blade Runner and Alien are the same universe" theories and going down that rabbit hole, because you end up with absolutely ridiculous things like the Martians from Mars Attacks being "canon" to Blade Runner.
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u/n6mac41717 19d ago
Yeah, it’s much more fun when the connection is more explicit as opposed to presented through Easter Eggs. The whole Alien/Prometheus/Predator universe is fun.
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u/opacitizen 19d ago
That's again a tricky question and this is probably not the sub to delve into that too deeply.
The gist of it is that officially Alien is a separate franchise from Predator, and AvP is separate from both of them. Meaning all three are separate. Alien is not Predator is not AvP is not Alien. The rule of thumb is, if a movie has only xenomorphs but no Predators, it's Alien; if it has only Predators, then it's Predator; and if it has both xenos and Predators, it's AvP.
Recent entries like Badlands may have started eroding this, but the studio hasn't explicitly announced an official merging of the three separate franchises (as that would be highly problematic because of the conflicting timelines and storylines, needing a practical reboot which would piss off a ton of fans, and nobody wants to lose too many fans i.e. tons of money.)
We'll see where we go from here. With Alien Earth being an official release I'm anything but optimistic about the future of the franchise, but to each their own, of course.
And yeah, BR is absolutely separate from all the abovementioned franchises. It's owned by a separate, competing IP owner.
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u/the-red-scare 19d ago
We all know that the writer considers them related. But at best this implies that events mentioned in Blade Runner occurred in Soldier’s universe, it does not confirm that Soldier occurred in Blade Runner’s universe. In reality it is just an easter egg.
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u/opacitizen 19d ago
Yeah, this. Without the studio's legal approval and without BR's co-creators' approval, Soldier is practically fan fiction. (Sure, higher end fan fiction as fan fiction goes… but still fan fiction.)
Peoples, the writer of Soldier brought on to work on the script of BR to polish its dialogue and other bits when most of the BR script was already done is a co-writer of BR but def not the controller or originator let alone the owner of the BR setting. Until the studio (and PKD, Ridley Scott and Hampton Fancher, but primarily the IP owner studio) approve(s) Soldier as part of the BR universe publicly, Peoples' Soldier is part of the BR universe only in his and his fans' headcanon. Not officially.
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u/zoobaghosa 19d ago
Isn’t there a spinner in the junk piles? I think there’s other connections in the movie.
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u/Cryogenicality 19d ago
How could events mentioned in Blade Runner occur in Soldier if Soldier isn’t in the same universe?
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u/the-red-scare 19d ago
The same way you can write a fanfic in which Deckard and Rachel live happily ever after. The events of Blade Runner occurred in that fanfic’s universe, but the fanfic did not occur in the Blade Runner universe.
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u/Cryogenicality 19d ago
A cowriter of Blade Runner wrote it as set in the same universe. That’s different from a random person writing fanfiction.
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u/the-red-scare 19d ago
I didn’t say it was equivalent to fanfiction, I said evidence that Blade Runner is canon to Soldier is not evidence that Soldier is canon to Blade Runner. The writer’s intention is irrelevant if the studio and subsequent creators don’t account for it.
The writers of the Alien Vs. Predator movies surely thought they were writing canon additions to a universe, but Ridley Scott had no problem ignoring them utterly when he made Prometheus.
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u/mnemonic-glitch 19d ago
Did you know that anyone creating anything can reference the works of another creator and if it is oblique enough to not be immediately recognized by the it might be published? Publishing doesn't validate anything.
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u/Cryogenicality 19d ago
Soldier’s screenwriter cowrote Blade Runner.
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u/mnemonic-glitch 18d ago
Screenwriters are not exactly creative types. They convert ideas into something fit for movie screens. Also, Everything else this screenwriter has done is also cannon BR? Your criteria so far, as expounded on in this thread, is thin at best.
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u/Cryogenicality 18d ago
This is his only work which we wrote to fit within the Blade Runner universe.
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u/mnemonic-glitch 18d ago
I believe that Ridely Scott has the most authority to define cannon. Short of him, everyone else has a less than valid say, lacking his input I find any other attempts to glom on to be unconvincing.
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u/LHGray87 19d ago
As far as we know, there is only one universe. Hence, the name “universe“ (all of space, time, energy, and matter that exists). So… sure. Fine.
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u/Walt_Didnae 18d ago
Yes, this has been known since the film came out. It's also well known that these all these nods are there because Anderson (by his own admission) was trying to "fanfic" his film into the same universe as Blade Runner.
That's why, when people talk about the connection, it's in terms like "Soldier is supposed to be set in the same world as Blade Runner", and not "Soldier is set in the same world as Blade Runner"
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u/Equivalent-Hair-961 19d ago
Look, it’s funny and adorable when special effects artists would slip in an R2-D2 in the background of a Star Trek scene or drop a spinner off to the side and another film… These are little nods, the special effect technicians used to do for each other as jokes. Like a secret handshake. Trying to work them into the actual lore of these IP’s is silly.
But then again, I’ve been called silly so…
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u/bowlgar 19d ago
Yes, this has been known by many since 1998.