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Prime Video released a new trailer for its limited series “Blade Runner 2099” during a panel at New York Comic Con, an annual fan convention in New York, on Saturday.
Michelle Yeoh, Hunter Schafer, Dimitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Matthew Needham, showrunner Silka Luisa, and executive producers Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson took part, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Luisa said the story follows Olwen, a replicant Blade Runner assigned to track human insurgents who continue to resist.
Olwen is instead searching for a missing colleague named Merrick, which Luisa said has not happened before.
Schafer said her human character is a fugitive hiding from Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Blade Runners who goes on the run to protect her younger brother and later goes undercover as a Blade Runner.
Yeoh said her character is dying and dislikes leaving things unfinished. Kosove said the relationship between the undercover human and Olwen forms the core of the series.
A clip shown only to the panel audience featured Yeoh’s character with blue-tinged nail beds. Luisa said the marker signals the character is dying and draws on shots of Roy Batty’s hands in the first “Blade Runner” film.
Luisa said the series takes place 50 years after “Blade Runner 2049,” once the replicant uprising has happened and humans have lost.
She described a junction where one species ends and another rises. The producers said both humans and replicants search for identity, humans in a world they no longer dominate and replicants in one they do.
Luisa said the first film and “Blade Runner 2049” have different aesthetics, so the series needed a third. Many sets are 360-degree builds with integrated lighting, interactive monitors and moving mechanical elements, with weathered props such as bobbleheads and soda cans suggesting people live and work there.
Johnson told the panel, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter, “Great science fiction isn’t actually about the future; it’s about the present.” He said the themes feel relatable amid the emergence of artificial intelligence in October 2026.
Needham described the series as a detective story with a mystery at its center and a philosophical debate about being human.
Luisa said replicants control the world but lack full humanity, and the clip showed a red-light district selling human experiences instead of sex. Replicants still cannot become pregnant or age, she said.
Luisa said the central question is why Merrick, who fought and sacrificed for replicant power, is now walking away from it.
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