Amazon Studios is developing a live-action TV series iteration of Blade Runner, with the filmmaker who started the franchise 40 years ago, Ridley Scott, serving as executive producer.
Narratively, Blade Runner 2099 will pick up half a century from Blade Runner 2049, the 2017 Warner Bros. sequel directed by Denis Villeneuve. Michael Green and Cynthia Yorkin, who helped write 2049, will also be in the writers' room for the new series. Also writing and executive producing is Silka Luisa, who helped pen Apple TV Plus' upcoming crime-mystery drama Shining Girls starring Elizabeth Moss.
Alcon Entertainment is producing the series in association with Scott's Scott Free Productions and Amazon Studios.
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Both Blade Runner films enjoyed critical praise that belied tepid global box office acceptance. This description more aptly applies to Scott's 1982 noir cult classic, which was based on the Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and starred Harrison Ford as a Los Angeles cop assigned to hunt down late actor Rutger Hauer's infamous Roy Batty and other dangerous genetically engineered super humans (aka "replicants") in the year 2019.
Villeneuve's 2017 follow-up starred Ryan Gosling as a replicant cop picking up on the replicant-hunting beat from Ford's Rick Deckard, only to find that Deckard's affair with replicant Rachael (actress Sean Young) decades earlier has created a Holy Grail of a hybrid love child. The sequel grossed $259 million worldwide, a result that has been widely painted as unsuccessful. But 2049, which won Oscars for visual effects and cinematography, certainly has its charms, too, inspiring Crunchyroll and Adult Swim to create the animated series Blade Runner: Black Lotus.
As for Amazon, it just spent $13 billion producing entertainment content in 2021, taking pricey swings on fantasy and sci-fi projects like Wheel of Time and The Expanse. ■
