Prime Video has released a new Blade Runner 2099 trailer during the upcoming series’ New York Comic Con panel on Saturday.
Michelle Yeoh, Hunter Schafer, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Matthew Needham, showrunner Silka Luisa and executive producers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson appeared on the Saturday night panel, where the cast and creative team discussed what’s in store for fans of the franchise and how the series will differ from its cinematic installments.
At the heart of the series is a mystery surrounding Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner who is “supposed to be searching for human insurgents, humans who continue to fight back,” Luisa said. “But… she’s actually here looking for a missing Blade Runner, Merrick, a colleague of hers, and this is the first time this has happened,” she teased.
Addressing her human character, Schafer shared that she is “more or less a fugitive hiding from the LAPD Blade Runners. Her job is being looted, and she has to go on the run and make sure to protect her little brother, and ultimately take on this mission where she goes undercover as a Blade Runner with the LAPD.” unfinished.”
In a clip shown exclusively in the play, Yeoh’s character can be seen with blue nail beds, which Luisa says was inspired by the original. Blade Runner movie and indicates that Yeoh’s character is dying.
“At first, we wanted to have a visual signifier…to never forget that she’s dying. She’s so powerful. She’s still so vital, and so we needed a marker so that she could always look down and remember that it’s just a few days,” she said. “We look at the first movie as a benchmark for how to do it. In this one, with Roy Batty, there are some really, really stunning shots where you see his hands and his nails, and that makes sense. It’s one extremity, so maybe his heart is moving and it’s harder to pump blood there. But we thought it would be a very clever way to see the progression over the course of the season as she gets closer to death.”
According to the showrunner, Blade Runner 2099 answers what happens when our time as a species ends. “We are 50 years later 2049and bad news. The worst has happened. The replicant uprising that was bubbling in the movies happened and the humans lost,” she teased.2099 takes place at a junction point when one species disappears and a new one appears. The first movie, what I loved about it, was that it looked at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asked the same question, but on a macro level. Humanity, what happens when we realize our time is running out? Are we going to accept this loss? Can we retain our humanity during this?
During the panel, the EPs announced that the limited series would explore how humans and replicants also search for their identities. For humans, it’s about finding their identity in a world where they’re no longer the dominant species, and for replicants, it’s about trying to find their identity in a world where they’re the dominant species and what that future will look like.
“The show is really about a birth,” Luisa continued later in the panel. “It’s about the birth of a city, of a society, of our characters, and it’s really the dawn of this new era. And in relation to that, when I think of a birth, I think of it as hot, sticky, bright, chaotic, and that’s where the environment comes from.”
Speaking about how the series’ aesthetic extends to the films, the showrunner noted that “the original first film actually has a very different aesthetic than 2049, and so 2099 had to have a third aesthetic. It had to honor what came before it, but it also had to present audiences with something original (that) still felt foreign.”
She then explained how production design was key to achieving this. “A lot of the sets are 360°. They have lighting built into them. There are monitors with graphics that the actors in the background interact with. There are mechanical elements that move. It really feels like you’re in a functional environment, and it’s a fake world,” she told the NYCC audience. “It’s not just about creation; it’s also about aging, weathering, layering. There are figurines on desks and soda cans that have been left behind. It really feels like people live here and work here.”
To explain why EP Johnson adhered to this vision of Blade Runner, he pointed out a saying about science fiction. “Great science fiction isn’t really about the future, it’s about the present. When Silka first came to us several years ago, the idea of something that would replace humans at the top of the food chain, so to speak, and what’s happening with humanity at that point seemed very resonant to us,” he shared. “Sitting here this evening in October 2026, as we all live in a world with the emergence of artificial intelligence, what does that mean for our future? We’ll let you all decide the show, of course. But we think the show’s themes and the characters’ dilemmas are very relevant.”
Kosove added that it was an “interesting and intelligent” break from the existing world of Blade Runner. “It’s someone who’s going undercover, and that dynamic between a human pretending to be a replicant and Owen, whose time is running out, and the impact they have on each other is at the heart of what the show is about,” he said. “I also think that, just from the point of view of a mystery where you peel back the onion and go back and have clues and Easter eggs across both films – even before the first film – I thought that was a great and exciting thing to explore.”
The series offers a completely different twist, according to Yeoh. “We all love the original, but now, 50 years later, things have changed enormously.” For Needham, it is a thrilling thriller and “a great detective novel. There’s a really exciting and beautiful mystery at the heart of it, and there’s also this huge philosophical debate going on around it about being human, and all the mysteries involved in that.”
Speaking about what audiences can expect from the series’ mystery, Luisa told the NYCC audience that the story will be about how “replicants are in control” but don’t have full humanity. “They have power, but they are made in our image. So they always have desires, and they always want more than what we gave them. We don’t see much, but in this clip, it’s actually the red light district. Instead of selling sex, it sells experiences, human experience,” said the showrunner. “Replicants still can’t get pregnant. They can’t age. They still want more than what they’ve been given, and they see all these humans out there, and they have a life they still can’t have.”
She concluded: “The mystery is why Merrick, someone who fought and sacrificed for all this power, is now turning his back on it and walking away from it. And the question is, for what?”
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