It’s official! Ridley Scott will be directing and producing a new installment of his 1982 sci-fi classic ‘Blade Runner.’

In an exclusive with Deadline, Ridley would be directing and producing “a film that advances his other seminal and groundbreaking science fiction film.” Does this mean the project will be a sequel, a prequel or even just an installment to the original? No one seems to know. All that is known is that this movie will have (to use the cryptic terms used to describe ‘Prometheus’) ‘Blade Runner’ DNA.

Scott will be working with Alcon Entertainment to get this project off the ground. Earlier this year, Alcon secured the film, television and all ancillary franchise rights to produce prequels and sequels to ‘Blade Runner.’ At the time, they stated that the franchise rights “would be all-inclusive, but exclude rights to remake the original. The Company, however, may produce projects based on situations introduced in the original film.”

“It would be a gross understatement to say that we are elated Ridley Scott will shepherd this iconic story into a new, exciting direction. We are huge fans of Ridley’s and of the original ‘Blade Runner.’ This is once in a lifetime project for us,” said Alcon co-founders and co-Chief Executive Officers Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove.

The original ‘Blade Runner’ has become an icon in the sci-fi film world and is considered a beloved classic. Based on the Philip K Dick novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’,  the film starred Harrison Ford as Richard Deckard, a burnt-out “Blade Runner” whose job is to track down and destroy rogue superhuman robots called replicants. His life becomes more complicated when he finds himself falling in love with one and struggles to keep her from being destroyed. (There’s a twist to Deckard’s character that I won’t reveal that left you thinking.)

‘Blade Runner’ celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007 in which Warner Bros digitally re-mastered and re-released the classic movie in DVD and Blu-ray.  This new ‘Blade Runner’ project is still in pre-production and there is no script yet, so it may be some time before anything is seen from Scott. But, none the less, the news is exciting and a long time coming for many fans of ‘Blade Runner’.