While we likely won’t be getting a new “Blade Runner” feature film anytime soon, the franchise is taking a page from “Alien: Earth” and expanding with a new spinoff television series at Amazon Prime Video. “Blade Runner 2099” is set 50 years after the events of “Blade Runner 2049,” the new cyberpunk show features an impressive cast led by Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”), Hunter Schafer (“Euphoria,” “Cucko”), and Tom Burke (“Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga”).
Burke is now dishing to Variety about the spinoff series where he states the project at Prime will be closer to Ridley Scott‘s original 1982 film led by Harrison Ford and the late Rutger Hauer than Denis Villeneuve‘s underrated follow-up starring Ryan Gosling, Ford, Jared Leto, and Ana de Armas.
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“There was a moment of just letting go… I was like, ‘OK, we’re really going out there with this.’” Burke stated that “Blade Runner 2099” is much closer to the aesthetic of the first movie than the second movie,” with a return to “that somewhat kind of Baroque, eclectic mix of cultures and time periods.”
“Can we really have a full sense of humanity without being very aware of our own dual sides? We all have the capacity for great evil as well as great good. I suppose every genre does that to some extent, but I do feel that the morality, that whole kind of thing is handled so well in the ‘Blade Runner’ world, to me. It’s got subtleties and nuances to it that I don’t think necessarily all sci-fi always has.”
Interestingly enough, the version fans and Scott both agree is the definitive version of “Blade Runner” isn’t the theatrical cut or the countless TV/foreign edits, but “Blade Runner: The Final Cut” that hammered audiences over the head with the reveal that Ford’s Deckard was a replicant the entire film (something quickly retconned in the Villeneuve sequel as the former killer of replicants was indeed just “human after all”).
If you don’t remember how “Blade Runner 2049” ended, the daughter of Deckard and Rachel was expected to lead some galaxy-wide revolution that would see the replicants’ uprising coming to Earth and expose Tyrell’s secret that humans/replicants can have children together (eroding the disposable workforce angle in the off-world colonies). Given the 50-year time jump between the two projects and how brutal his dystopian world is, it was assumed that we likely wouldn’t be seeing major characters return (although, they could in flashbacks).
Fingers crossed we’ll finally see some of the off-world colonies and the replicant/human dynamic there in the new series. That has been a huge missing puzzle piece with the franchise as replicants are used both in military and labor capacities, things only talked about in the previous two films and teased in the anime spinoff short film “Blade Runner 2022: Blackout.”
Amazon has yet to announce when exactly “Blade Runner 2099” will be released on the streaming service but is expected to come out sometime in 2025.