Blade Runner 2099: The Trailer Reverses Humans and Replicants

Prime Video unveiled the first teaser for Blade Runner 2099 during San Diego Comic-Con. The limited series will premiere on November 25, 2026, with all eight episodes released simultaneously in more than 240 countries.

Nine years after Blade Runner 2049, the franchise jumps half a century into the future and reaches live-action television for the first time. The saga had already moved to the small screen through the anime Blade Runner: Black Lotus, set in 2032, but 2099 represents its first true live-action serial chapter.

The trailer shows a Los Angeles rebuilt after an uprising that overturned the balance of power. Replicants control the city, while human beings have become second-class citizens. Here, the war is already over. And humanity has lost it.

Cora and Olwen, Two Identities on the Verge of Collapse

Hunter Schafer plays Cora, a human who has spent her life fleeing from Blade Runners and who, in order to survive, assumes the identity of one herself. Her cover leads her to Olwen, a replicant played by Michelle Yeoh who has reached the final days of her existence. The two are forced to work together to track down a fugitive carrying a truth capable of destabilising the city.

Olwen even knows the exact day of her own death. Silka Luisa, the series’ creator and showrunner, explained to Entertainment Weekly that the character deliberately revisits Roy Batty’s conflict from the 1982 film, this time telling it explicitly from the replicant’s point of view. Cora follows the opposite trajectory: she is human, but the need to continually change her face and identity has consumed the very quality that should distinguish her.

The series also brings back elements from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel by Philip K. Dick that inspired the original film. The eight-hour format will allow the story to explore places, events and narrative segments that remained at the edges of the two feature films. Michael Green, screenwriter of Blade Runner 2049, helped develop the noir mystery, while Ridley Scott serves as one of the executive producers.

Jonathan van Tulleken, who previously directed two episodes of Shōgun, directs the first two instalments. Dimitri Abold and Lewis Gribben complete the main cast; Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke and Maurizio Lombardi will appear in recurring roles.

The “Sunshine Noir” Built Between Prague and Barcelona

The visual identity of the saga is also changing temperature. Silka Luisa described the style of Blade Runner 2099 as “sunshine noir”: the dark rain of Scott’s film and the cold landscapes of Denis Villeneuve give way to heat, sunlight and coastal environments. Part of the action will reach Santa Monica, while preserving the layered, mechanical architecture of the first Blade Runner.

The production prioritised physical sets and in-camera effects, limiting the use of CGI so that the actors could move through environments that had actually been built. A new spinner was also created with the involvement of Paul Inglis, the supervising art director of Blade Runner 2049, ensuring that the flying vehicle would appear more advanced without losing its connection to the earlier models.

Filming took place primarily in Prague, with additional production work in Barcelona. According to the Czech Film Commission, Film United’s production occupied Barrandov Studios and numerous surrounding locations across two filming blocks: from June 30 to August 23 and from September 30 to December 19, 2024. The project had originally been scheduled to begin in Belfast in 2023, before the Writers Guild of America strike disrupted the schedule and pushed the production to relocate to the Czech Republic.

Blade Runner 2099 therefore has eight episodes to prove that a television expansion can deepen the saga’s ambiguity without reducing it to a catalogue of references: now it is humanity that must ask how much of its identity can survive in a world built by someone else.