‘Blade Runner 2099’ Drops New Trailer, Team Teases a Detective Story Set When Replicants Take Over

Prime Video 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 evening panel, where the cast and creative team teased what’s in store for fans of the franchise and how the series will be different than its film installments.

At the core of the show is a mystery surrounding Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner who is “supposed to be looking for human insurgents, humans that continue to fight back,” said Luisa. “But… she’s actually here looking for a Blade Runner who’s gone missing, Merrick, one of her colleagues, and that’s the first time that happened,” she teased.

Speaking to her human character, Schafer shared she is “more or less a fugitive in hiding from LAPD Blade Runners. Her work gets raided, and she’s gotta go on the run and make sure she protects her little brother, and ultimately undergo this mission where she goes undercover as a Blade Runner with LAPD.” Yeoh teased that her character is dying in the limited series: “She knows the time is running out, and she’s a character that doesn’t like to leave things unfinished.”

According to the Oscar winner, viewers will get the opportunity to see how replicants actually work.

“How do you notice the difference between them, because they’re so human-like? But there’s something about the replicants. We found the characters can be — they’re actually quite wicked,” Yeoh said. “It’s like toying with their food, because the humans are so weak next to them. We’re literally their God. I think the first fight sequence that we had with a human, I was going like, ‘No, no, can I get more into the fight? ‘They’re like, ‘Sorry, no, he’s human.’”

During a clip shown exclusively to the room, Yeoh’s character can be seen with blue-like nail beds, which Luisa explained was inspired by the original Blade Runner film and indicates Yeoh’s character is dying.

“It was something early on where 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 there needed to be some marker that she could always look down and remember it’s only days,” she said. “We look to the first film as a reference for how to do it. In that, with Roy Batty, there’s a couple of really, really gnarly shots where you see his hands and his nails, and it makes sense. It’s an extremity, so maybe his heart is shifting, and it’s harder to pump blood there. But we thought that was going to be a really clever way to see the progression over 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 after 2049, and bad news. The worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place, and humans have lost,” she teased. “2099 is taking place at a junction point when one species is ending and a new one is rising. The first film, something I loved about it was that it was looking at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asked that same question, but on a macro level. Mankind, what happens when we realize our time is running out? Are we going to accept that loss? Can we hold on to our humanity during it?”

During the panel, the EPs teased that the limited series will explore how humans and replicants, through this mystery, are both searching for identity. For humans, it’s about finding their identity in a world in which they’re no longer the dominant species, and for replicants, it’s trying to find their identity in a world where they are the dominant species and what that future looks like.

“The show is really about a birth,” Luisa continued later on 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 terms of that, when I think of a birth, I think it’s hot, sticky, bright, chaotic, and that’s where the environment came from.”

Speaking to how the show’s aesthetic expands upon the films, the showrunner noted that “the first original film actually has a very different aesthetic than 2049, and so 2099 needed to have a third aesthetic. It needed to honor what came before it, but it needed to also introduce audiences to something original [that] still felt foreign.”

She later explained how key production design was to delivering that. “So many of the sets are 360. The lighting is built into them. There are monitors with graphics that background actors are interacting with. There are mechanical elements that are moving. It really feels like a functional environment, and it’s a fake world,” she told the NYCC crowd. “It’s not just the creation; it’s also the aging, the weathering, the layering. There are bobbleheads on top of the desks and soda cans that have been left. You really get a sense that people are living here and they’re working here.”

In terms of why EP Johnson signed on to this vision of Blade Runner, he pointed to a saying about science fiction. “Great science fiction isn’t actually about the future; it’s about the present. When Silka first came to see us now several years ago, the idea of something replacing humans at the top of the food chain, as it were, and what happens with humanity at that point seemed very resonant to us,” he shared. “Sitting here this evening in October of 2026, as we’re all living in a world with the emergence of artificial intelligence, what does that mean for our future? We’ll let all of you decide about the show, of course. But we think that the themes of the show and the dilemmas for the characters are very relatable.”

Added Kosove, it was an “interesting and clever” departure from the existing world of Blade Runner. “It’s someone going undercover, and that dynamic between a human pretending to be a replicant and Owen, whose time is running out, and the impact that they have on one another is at the core of what the show is about,” he said. “I also think, just from the standpoint of a mystery where you’re peeling back the onion and going back and having clues and Easter eggs through both movies — even before the first movie — I thought was a tremendous, exciting thing to explore.”

The series offers a completely different spin, according to Yeoh. “We all love the original, but now to go 50 years forward, things have changed tremendously.” For Needham, it’s an exciting thriller and “a great detective story. There is a really exciting, beautiful mystery at the heart of it, and there’s also this huge philosophical debate going on around it that is about being human, and all the mysteries involved in that tied up.”

Speaking to what the audience can expect from the mystery of the series, Luisa told the NYCC crowd that the story will be about how “replicants are in control” but don’t have full humanity. “They have agency, but they are made in our likeness. So they still have desires, and they still want more than what they’ve been given. You can’t see much of it, but in that clip, it’s actually the red light district. Instead of selling sex, it sells experiences, human experience,” the showrunner said. “Replicants still can’t get pregnant. They can’t get old. They still want more than what they’ve been given, and they see all these humans out there, and they have they have a life that they still can’t have.”

She concluded: “The mystery is asking why Merrick, someone who fought and sacrificed for all this power, is now turning his back and walking away from it. And the question is for what?”