The 'Blade Runner 2099' Creator on Tying the Show to The Movies

A live-action Blade Runner TV show is coming to Prime Video in November, and you’d be correct in thinking you hadn’t heard much of anything about it until, like, yesterday. San Diego Comic-Con brought out the first teaser and first real details for Blade Runner 2099, which stars Michelle Yeoh as a Replicant Blade Runner whose life is winding down and Hunter Schafer as a human pretending to be a Replicant who works alongside her. Blade Runner 2099 will run eight episodes, providing more ground to cover than Ridley Scott’s original film—released in 1982, but set in 2019—or Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. But the show remains intimately tied to the stories that came before it. “It’s just one of those movies that you never forget the first time you saw it,” 2099 creator Silka Luisa said of Scott’s film during the panel. “And for me, what I remember most was rooting for all the Replicants. For Rachael, for Roy Batty, even Leon. I don’t know if that’s what everyone else was feeling, but that’s who I empathize with. And that was such an unsettling and beautiful idea that it might not be humans who teach us what humanity is. I think what was so exciting and challenging about doing th