A live-action Blade Runner TV show is coming to Prime Video in November, and you’d be correct in thinking you hadn’t heard much of anything about it until, like, yesterday. San Diego Comic-Con brought out the first teaser and first real details for Blade Runner 2099, which stars Michelle Yeoh as a Replicant Blade Runner whose life is winding down and Hunter Schafer as a human pretending to be a Replicant who works alongside her.
Blade Runner 2099 will run eight episodes, providing more ground to cover than Ridley Scott’s original film—released in 1982, but set in 2019—or Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. But the show remains intimately tied to the stories that came before it.
“It’s just one of those movies that you never forget the first time you saw it,” 2099 creator Silka Luisa said of Scott’s film during the panel. “And for me, what I remember most was rooting for all the Replicants. For Rachael, for Roy Batty, even Leon. I don’t know if that’s what everyone else was feeling, but that’s who I empathize with. And that was such an unsettling and beautiful idea that it might not be humans who teach us what humanity is. I think what was so exciting and challenging about doing the show was chasing that feeling—and trying to have that moral ambiguity [and] that unsettling tone carry throughout a whole series, which obviously has a much larger canvas.”
Scott is an executive producer on Blade Runner 2099, and was “generous” with his time while the team was working on it. “What is so fantastic about the first film is that it doesn’t lay out all the expositions,” Luisa continued. “There’s so much imagination that you need to bring to fill in the gaps, which is wonderful as a viewer. But then when you’re the writer who has to go and build on top of that canon, you really want to make sure that the assumptions that you’re making are the right ones. And what was so great was to actually have Ridley, the visual author of Blade Runner, doing that alongside me.”
Picking up the story 50 years after Villeneuve’s film presented plenty of challenges—especially since the 44-year-old original still feels so timely.
“So much of what Blade Runner was promising was coming feels immediate and like it’s around the corner. And so in order to imagine the future, we have to project even further out,” Luisa explained. “For me, the biggest unknown is what happens when our time ends, what happens when humans are no longer the dominant species. And that idea is already in the franchise. You can always kind of feel that the Replicants are about to fight back. And in 2049, the very end of the film…as an audience member, that’s how I felt like it was being left off.”
She continued. “And in my head, I imagine there was this great war between the two sides. To me, what was the most interesting wasn’t the battle, but the aftermath. What does it look like to lose? And for humans, if they are only given a much smaller slice of the pie, how do they keep their humanity? That’s where the idea for [Schafer’s character] Cora came out of.”
Blade Runner 2099 premieres November 25 on Prime Video.
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