Netflix's No. 1 Movie Right Now Is an Epic Star-Studded Flick

An epic Ryan Gosling movie is the No. 1 movie on the streamer's charts right now. Blade Runner 2049, a 2017 sci-fi blockbuster, is the top movie on Netlfix in the United States, and No. 3 on the overall Top 10. It lands behind only the new season of Bridgerton at No. 1 and the new baking competition show, Is It Cake? at No. 2.

In addition to Gosling, Blade Runner 20149 features Harrison Ford, Jared Leto, Ana de Armas and Robin Wright. A sequel to the iconic 1982 film Blade Runner, it continues the story of Rick Deckard, played by Ford, a San Francisco police officer who may or may not be a synthetic lifeform — known as replicants — with implanted memories that give him the illusion, and delusion, of being a human. In the sequel, Gosling plays K, a replicant Blade Runner who hunts down other replicants for the LAPD. The original film is based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and was directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Blade Runner 2049 is directed by Denis Villeneuve from a screenplay by Fancher and Michael Green.

In a previous interview with Collider, Gosling spoke about the film and offered some insight into why he wanted to take on the sci-fi epic. "It was a very unique opportunity. It's such a wildly unique film," he said. "When I first saw it, I was 12. It had been out for 10 years. I thought I was just watching a science fiction movie, but what I experienced was something very different. What's interesting about the film is not just the experience of watching it, but how it stays with you. I wasn't asking myself, at 12, what it meant to be a human being. I was after that, maybe subconsciously, that those seeds were planted. I realized how much influence it had on the culture I grew up in."

He continued, "Then, to read a script that was a love letter, in certain ways, to the original, but was also very much its own thing. It was respectfully carrying out the narratives and themes of the original, but at the same time, introducing its own conceptual ideas. It was still massive in scale, but at the same time, it was intimate, personal and emotional. This is an experience that's unique to Blade Runner. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to be a part of something very unique." Blade Runner 2049 is now streaming on Netflix.