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- Amazon has confirmed Blade Runner 2099 is launching exclusively on Prime Video on November 25, 2026
- The sci-fi series stars Michelle Yeoh (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once) and Hunter Shaefer (Euphoria) as co-leads
- The limited series will explore a world where humanity is on its last legs, largely replaced by Replicants as the dominant power on Earth
It’s hard to think of a sci-fi film as influential as Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner. Based on the classic Phillip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Scott’s masterpiece explores the unease of a newly post-Earth human civilisation contending with its artificial tools, human-like androids known as Replicants, outgrowing them. And, later this year, we’re going to see what happens when Replicants take over.
Amazon has confirmed Blade Runner 2099 will launch exclusively on Prime Video on November 25, 2026. The limited series will feature eight episodes, and is being brought to life by Shining Girls’ Silka Luisa, with Scott himself returning as executive producer.
Blade Runner 2099 is the franchise’s first entry on the small screen. Despite this, Luisa is pulling from each entry in the series before 2099 – including Dick’s novels – to deliver a sci-fi story worthy of the franchise’s expectation-setting history. And, with plenty of concern for the growing influence AI is having in our day-to-day reality, this series is landing at the perfect time.
Check out Blade Runner 2099’s first trailer below, and read to learn what you can expect from the series later this year.
What Will ‘Blade Runner 2099’ Be About?
While Amazon has been pretty tight-lipped about the project ever since we first heard about it in 2021, we finally have a pretty good idea of what we’ll be looking at once Blade Runner 2099 drops this November. And, as is tradition, it looks like we’re getting some deep philosophical musings on the nature of existence, life, reality, humanity, and death.
Part of the reason the show took so long, showrunner Silka Luisa told Entertainment Weekly, was that production wanted to replicate (pardon the pun) the vibe and atmosphere of the original films: “We stayed very true to the noir principles of Blade Runner. And there’s a mystery at the heart of the show that looks both forwards and backwards in terms of the mythology that fans are gonna be very excited about.”
Set long after the events of Scott’s 1982 original, and 50 years after the Dennis Villeneuve-helmed sequel Blade Runner 2049, 2099 is set on an Earth where replicants have taken control of the blue marble’s social order, and are presumably now seeking to eradicate what is left of humanity.
The series follows a human fugitive – Cora, played by Euphoria’s Hunter Schaefer – as she evades a group of pursuing Blade Runners. In case you’re not as drenched in the series’ fiction as die-hards, a Blade Runner has historically been a human tasked with tracking down and ‘retiring’ rogue replicants that have escaped human control. Why a group of Blade Runners would be tracking down a fellow human is anyone’s guess, though it could be that since the balance of power has been upended, and replicants now rule, the role of a Blade Runner has been inverted to track and eliminate rogue humans.
Regardless: to evade capture, Cora will reluctantly team up with an ageing replicant – Olwen, played by Everything, Everywhere, All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh – days from her pre-determined date of death, operating with the neon drenched city of Los Angeles. Together, the pair will hunt a runaway hiding a “truth that could collapse their fragile city”.
Showrunner Luisa told EW that 2099 is set at the beginning of a “new world order”, with replicants having pushed humanity into the role of second-class citizens.
“The war has happened and the humans have lost. Our worst fears imagined,” Luisa said. “The show is really imagining what comes after us, and what does it mean to be human in a world where humanity is no longer relevant?”
The particular framing of a human seeking to shed her humanity for survival, and an android grappling with the unfair march of death, is fodder for the philosophically-existential leanings the franchise is known for: and was crafted with intent.
According to Luisa, Cora is a human who has spent her life evading Blade Runners, and in the struggle to survive the day-to-day challenges of this reality, she’s lost touch with her humanity. “She’s a human who has lost her humanity. And the question for the series is: Once you’ve lost (your) humanity, can you regain it?”
Similarly, Yeoh’s character Olwen has been set up to explore similar ground as the original rain-soaked masterpiece’s Roy Batty – a replicant who, facing his imminent death, rebels in an effort to prolong the life he believes he deserves, kicking off the events of the classic movie. According to Luisa, the major difference is that 2099 will present the “very relatable and human fear of not wanting to die” from the replicant’s point of view.
“She knows she only has days left to live because replicants know down to the day when they’re going to die. It’s certain and it’s definitive,” Luisa said. “There’s something about the idea that you’re not winding down when you die. You’re spiraling out. There’s a volatility, a danger, and a desperation to it, which I think Michelle really tapped into in her performance.”
That ‘new world order’ doesn’t only show itself in the world’s demographics, however. If Blade Runner was dark and rainy, and 2049 was cold and snowy, Luisa calls 2099 sunshine noir: “You’re very much still in the Blade Runner world, but the show is about a birth. It’s about the birth of a city. It’s about the birth of the replicant era. These characters are discovering who they really are, and so the climate is hot, it’s sticky, it’s sunny.”
While the production was focused on visually building on the world set out in Scott’s 1982 original, and expanded on in Villeneuve’s 2017 follow-up, Luisa also returned to the original dystopian sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, penned by author Phillip K. Dick in 1968, to help flesh out the world beyond what has been shown on screen before.
“Because it’s a TV show and you have so many more hours to fill, we have this great opportunity to actually build out the world, and to go to other places, and to build out parts of history and parts of the universe that I feel like fans have been really curious about and just haven’t gotten to see yet,” Luisa said. “(Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) was really helpful in helping us guide us where we could do that.”
‘Blade Runner 2099’ Confirmed Cast
While Shaefer and Yeoh act as co-leads, there are a few other Blade Runner 2099 characters we know will be appearing. However, don’t expect Rick Deckard or 2049’s K to make an appearance – 2099 is set 50 years in the future, after all.
Here’s Blade Runner 2099’s confirmed cast members so far:
- Michelle Yeoh as Olwen
- Hunter Shaefer as Cora
- Dimitri Abold
- Tom Burke
- Lewis Gribben
- Johnny Harris
- Wil Coban as Hodge
- Alexandra Russo as Hedi
- Hugo Hamlet as Buster Friendly
- Francis Lovehall as Dominik
- Hassan Najib as Oddo
Where Can I Watch Blade Runner 2099?
With all those tantalising details out of the way, you thankfully don’t have to wait too long before you can finally dive into the series proper: Blade Runner 2099 is launching exclusively on Prime Video on 18 November, 2026.
In the meantime, it might be a good idea to brush up on the original Blade Runner, and its stellar sequel Blade Runner 2049, ahead of 2099’s release.
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