The replicants have finally won. Nearly five years after Prime Video first began developing “Blade Runner 2099,” the streamer has unveiled the first images from its long-awaited sci-fi series, revealing Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer in a radically transformed Los Angeles where humanity is no longer in control.
The first look arrives just before the show’s San Diego Comic-Con panel this weekend, where Yeoh, Schafer, showrunner Silka Luisa, and members of the creative team are scheduled to appear. With Prime Video promising exclusive footage and surprises, a first teaser seems likely to debut during the Hall H presentation.
Set 50 years after Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049,” the series unfolds after a replicant uprising has overturned the social order established across the first two films.
“There’s been a replicant uprising that feels like it’s been bubbling up,” Luisa told Entertainment Weekly this week. “So the war has happened, and the humans have lost. Our worst fears imagined.”
“The replicants are now the power brokers of the city,” she added. “And humans are the second-class citizens.”
Yeoh stars as Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner hunting a group of missing rogue replicants while approaching the predetermined end of her own lifespan.
“She’s in the final days of her life, so she knows she has only days left to live because replicants know down to the day when they’re gonna die,” Luisa explained. “It’s certain and it’s definitive.”
The character deliberately turns the story of Roy Batty—Rutger Hauer’s doomed replicant from Ridley Scott’s original film—inside out.
“Her story is very much taking the Roy Batty story from the first film,” Luisa said. “We’re telling it from the replicant’s point of view.”
Television also gives the series room to explore “this very relatable and human fear of not wanting to die,” she added. “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.”
Schafer plays Cora, a human fugitive who has spent her life running from Blade Runners but must now pretend to be one. She joins Olwen’s search for the missing replicants, although surviving for so long has left her increasingly disconnected from her own identity.
“She’s a human who has lost her humanity,” Luisa said. “And the question for the series is: Once you’ve lost your humanity, can you regain it?”
The series will feature new characters rather than bringing back Harrison Ford’s Deckard or Ryan Gosling’s K, but its central mystery will look “both forwards and backwards” through the franchise’s mythology. Luisa developed the project with “Blade Runner 2049” screenwriter Michael Green, while Scott served as an executive producer and advised the team on the original film’s canon.
“It was really important to both get his blessing and have his insight into what his original intentions were,” Luisa said of Scott.
Luisa also returned to Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” to expand areas of the world the films could only suggest. “The show is really imagining what comes after us,” she explained, “and what does it mean to be human in a world where humanity is no longer relevant?”
Visually, “Blade Runner 2099” will move away from the original film’s rain and “2049’s” wintry desolation. Luisa described its aesthetic as “sunshine noir,” placing the characters in a hot, sticky, coastal Los Angeles during the birth of a new replicant era.
“You’re still very much in the Blade Runner world,” she said. “So it’s like you’re seeing Ridley’s texture, but you’re seeing it in the sunshine noir filter.”
“Blade Runner 2099” premieres on Prime Video later in 2026. An exact date has not been announced, but its Comic-Con panel should bring the clearest look yet at the franchise’s new world—and, almost surely, its first teaser, if not, at least the official premiere date. Check out the first look images, provided by Entertainment Weekly, below.
Born in Chile, raised in Canada, now living in Brooklyn, NY, Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2007. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, MuchMusic, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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