10 long years after “Blade Runner 2049,” the franchise is going 50 years into its future with “Blade Runner 2099.” At San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, Prime Video officially unveiled the trailer for “Blade Runner 2099,” a new live-action TV series set in the iconic sci-fi world.
Created by “Shining Girls” showrunner Silka Luisa, “Blade Runner 2099” stars Michelle Yeoh as Olwen, a synthetic human known as a replicant created for manual labor who is approaching the end of her lifespan as the series begins. Hunter Schafer co-leads the series as the character Cora, while the main cast is rounded out by Dimitri Abold and Lewis Gribben. Recurring cast members for the series include Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke, and Maurizio Lombardi.
Based on the 1968 novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by celebrated speculative fiction author Phillip K. Dick, the first “Blade Runner” film premiered in 1982. Directed by Ridley Scott in his third feature effort after “The Duelists” and “Alien,” the pioneering cyberpunk film starred Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a washed-out cop living in the then-future 2019 who is pulled out of retirement for one last job to hunt escaped replicants across a gray and cloudy Los Angeles, bringing his own sense of humanity into question.
Put out into theaters with various studio-mandated changes, “Blade Runner” was initially a financial failure and received tepid reviews from critics. Over the decades, and as several alternate cuts have been produced, the film has come to be regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, and a pioneering work in the cyberpunk and neo-noir genres.
A legacy sequel film titled “Blade Runner 2049,” set thirty years after the original, was released in 2017. Directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling and a returning Ford, the film received critical acclaim. The franchise has also spawned a trilogy of short films bridging the gap between the two movies, as well as the 2021 anime limited series “Blade Runner: Black Lotus.”
“Blade Runner 2099” premieres on Prime Video on November 25. Watch the teaser for the show below.
