Blade Runner 2099 Is Exciting, But We Had A Live-Action Blade Runner Show Already

On November 25, Prime Video will finally release its Blade Runner TV series, Blade Runner 2099. It’s been a long time coming — Ridley Scott first announced the show way back in 2021 — but, based on the cast and the trailer and the plot details, it’s looking like it’ll be worth the wait. Blade Runner is one of the most visually stunning and morally complex sci-fi universes out there, and I can’t wait to spend a whole season of television basking in neon-drenched futuristic crime.

Blade Runner 2099 stars Michelle Yeoh as a replicant blade runner, nearing the end of her life cycle, and Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer as her partner, a human pretending to be a replicant, and I’m excited to see the on-screen dynamic that those two incredible actors have cooked up. This will be the Blade Runner franchise’s first official foray into live-action television, nearly a decade after Denis Villeneuve’s dramatically satisfying but financially disappointing sequel movie, but we technically already got a live-action Blade Runner show last year.

With its look at a dystopian future governed by trillionaires and megacorporations, Alien: Earth often felt more like Blade Runner than Alien. Until the xenomorphs came to terra firma, it was basically a Blade Runner show: a cyborg’s identity crisis, a widespread corporate conspiracy, a shady criminal underworld. Plus, Alien technically takes place in the same universe as Blade Runner, so Alien: Earth was set in the Blade Runner universe, because the Blade Runner universe and the Alien universe are one and the same.

In terms of official canon, Alien and Blade Runner don’t take place in the same universe — they’re different continuities with different rights holders — but Scott included a few Easter eggs tying the two films together. So, Alien: Earth was really our first Blade Runner TV show.

Blade Runner 2099 Has A Premise On Par With Alien: Earth's

It was easy for Disney to market Alien: Earth last year, because it had the hook of bringing the franchise to Earth, and that was more than enough to sell it to its target audience. Alien fans have been excited to see the xenomorphs come to Earth since the teaser trailer for Alien 3 falsely advertised a xenomorph attack on Earth to be its plot. More than three decades later, Alien: Earth finally brought the franchise to Earth. It was enough of a hook that FX and Noah Hawley felt compelled to put it right in the title, and it worked: the series was a smashing success.

Until recently, Blade Runner 2099 didn’t have a hook like that, beyond the promise of a return to Blade Runner’s quintessential cyberpunk world. But now that the trailer has dropped, and we’re being spoonfed plot details, Blade Runner 2099 finally has that Alien: Earth-style hook. In 2099, 50 years after Officer K’s dark night of the digital soul, a replicant uprising has flipped the script on the class divide. Now, the replicants are running the show, and humans are the new second-class citizens.

This is a great hook that completely subverts Blade Runner’s original premise while retaining the same themes. It’s still about the ruling class lording their power over the 99%, and the ever-widening divide between the haves and the have-nots, but that dynamic has shifted. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens after the replicants launch their own futuristic French Revolution, and the oppressed become the oppressors.

The promise of a lavish, big-budget show set in the Blade Runner universe was enough to get me hyped for this show. The casting of Yeoh and Schafer, two of my favorite actors working today, was enough to get me hyped for this show. But now, Blade Runner 2099 is my most anticipated show of the year (sorry, Lanterns).