The next official Blade Runner project won’t play on a screen. You’ll walk into it.
Behaviour Interactive and PHI Studio are building a Blade Runner immersive experience that lands in North America in 2027, made with Alcon Entertainment, which owns the Blade Runner IP. The announcement came back in May.
Not a third film. Not a spinoff series. A place you buy a ticket to and stand inside.
What the people making it are promising
The pitch is a dystopian world with a narrative attached, its own aesthetic, and what the team calls the “philosophical essence” of Ridley Scott’s original. Which is the part that matters. Anyone can hang neon in a warehouse.
“Blade Runner is a work that has shaped the collective imagination. We are honored to collaborate with Alcon Entertainment and PHI Studio to deliver an experience that pushes the boundaries of immersion. This project also marks a new chapter in Behaviour’s positioning beyond video games,” said Dominique Lebel, senior vice president at Behaviour Interactive, and Shahinaze Hachem, head of immersive entertainment at Behaviour Interactive.
That last line is the tell. Behaviour is a video game company, and this is the company saying out loud that it wants to be more than one.
PHI Studio brings the other half. It works in creating and presenting immersive experiences, so the partnership splits along obvious lines: Behaviour handles the creative and technical muscle it built making games, PHI handles the business of putting people inside a room and making them feel something.
Why this franchise, and why now
Blade Runner has been feeding other people’s science fiction for four decades. Adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it became one of the most popular movies of the ’80s on the strength of Harrison Ford, Sean Young and Rutger Hauer, plus visuals that people still describe from memory.
It rewrote what dystopia looked like, and the debt shows up everywhere in the genre.
The franchise itself has moved slowly by comparison. Blade Runner 2049 arrived in 2017. The miniseries Blade Runner 2099 is still upcoming. An installation you physically enter is a strange next move on paper, and a sensible one if you’ve ever looked at that skyline and wanted to be in it rather than watching it.
There’s something about a not-so-distant future rendered in full that keeps pulling people back, and this version asks you to show up in person.
The part nobody has answered yet
Locations are still blank. The experience is headed to North American cities beginning in 2027, with exact cities and details set to be announced in the coming months.
So if you’re the kind of fan who’s watched the original enough times to have opinions about which cut is correct, this is the one to track.
“As stewards of the Blade Runner universe, we approach every extension with a strong sense of responsibility. Behaviour Interactive and PHI Studio understand what resonates with fans, and we’re confident the experience they’re creating will open an exciting new way to engage with the world,” said Broderick Johnson and Andrew Kosove, co-CEOs of Alcon Entertainment.
