The Blade Runner universe—featured in films Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 (as well as a series of tie-in shorts for the sequel) is set to grow even further, exploring the uneasy world of humans and replicants like never before. Amazon is moving forward with the production of a sequel TV series to both films, Blade Runner 2099, set just before the close of that universe’s 21st century.
The Blade Runner series was previously announced at Amazon but is now being officially greenlit, and it is going to be executive produced by Ridley Scott with Silka Luisa as its showrunner. Alcon Entertainment, Scott Free Productions, and Amazon Studios are set to produce the Blade Runner sequel series.
The news, reported by Variety, will come as welcome information to longtime fans of the cyberpunk franchise that all but defined the term for the sci-fi genre. Amazon, trying its hand at the game of creating original streaming content, has now set its sights on adapting properties audiences are familiar with, such as the recent The Rings of Power based on Tolkien's legendarium. Scott has returned to his sci-fi roots in a big way, with his prequels to the Alien franchise and his recent sci-fi show on HBO, the sadly cancelled Raised By Wolves. Returning to the Blade Runner well makes sense for both parties. Adding in Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) as a showrunner means something interesting is brewing.
1982 saw the release of Scott's baroque sci-fi neo-noir, Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. It was moderately an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie was set in 2019 (three years ago now) and concerned detective Deckard, who was a Blade Runner, in-universe slang for someone who was tasked with hunting down replicates, which are strong androids made for harmful labor conditions that were manufactured on the cellular level. Replicants were, according to the Tyrell corporation who made them, "More human than human." Deckard, hunting down five rogue replicants on earth, doesn't know he himself is one until the end of the film.
Decades would pass before 2017 saw the release of Blade Runner 2049, a set-thirty-years-later sequel to the first movie featuring Ryan Gosling and a returning Ford. The film featured Gosling as a replicant cop hunting down Deckard, whom he discovers is the first replicant to have fathered an actual child. The rest of the film involves Gosling trying to reunite the pair. With all that in mind, it’s fair to guess that Blade Runner 2099 will join its predecessors in exploring the human condition through a futuristic lens.
Blade Runner 2099 will be released on Amazon Prime Video.
Source: Variety