‘Blade Runner 2099’ Series at Amazon Delays Production for a Year Due to WGA Strike
Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 series is postponing principal photography for a full year, just as it was gearing up to start filming in Belfast in the coming months.
The announcement was made by Northern Ireland Screen, via Deadline, who said in a statement:
“Northern Ireland Screen confirmed Blade Runner 2099 has been delayed. Northern Ireland Screen is extremely disappointed that Blade Runner 2099 is not going ahead at this time due to the ongoing writers’ strike.
The project has been prepping on the ground in Belfast for many months now. The WGA strike has been halting production all over the world and we hope a fair deal is reached soon so crew can get back to work.”
Amazon gave Blade Runner 2099 a full series order back in September, and announced that Ridley Scott was on board to executive produce. The events of the series, like the title suggests, will take place 50 years after Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film Blade Runner 2049. Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) is on board as writer and executive producer.
The scripts were thought to be complete at this point, but the delay could be due to a combination of different factors, most of them related to the WGA strike. Much like Tony Gilroy on Andor, Luisa might be refusing to do any work on the series while the guild is on strike; the producers probably want to have writers on the set as well. Because there is no end in sight for the strike as of now, it’s possible the studio is just being cautious and delaying the entire production for a year as things are not looking like they will be resolved before the Fourth of July. Scheduling issues with people involved in the project might also be in place.
We can also not discount the fact that perhaps the show is having some behind-the-scenes troubles and the studio sees an opportunity here to manage a PR disaster and attribute a production delay to the strike while they try to rework the series. If that is not the case here, it will definitely be the case for other projects being delayed across the entire industry.
We don’t know much about the people involved with the series yet. It was reported earlier this year that Station Eleven‘s Jeremy Podeswa would be directing the pilot, and there were some rumblings as well about Jodie Comer possibly starring in it. Apparently, though, Comer either passed on or exited the project in recent weeks, as Jeff Sneider said on The Hot Mic podcast, where he also broke the news about Comer’s involvement in the first place.
It was speculated at the time that it might have been because of a better deal from a competing studio (wink, Marvel, wink). This is unconfirmed for now, but if it’s true that Comer was at one point supposed to star in Blade Runner 2099, that would mark the second time she’s had to depart a Ridley Scott project recently, after exiting Napoleon due to a scheduling issue.
Scott is currently deep into post-production of Napoleon, which is out in theaters this fall before rolling into Apple TV Plus, and is also getting ready to shoot his highly-anticipated Gladiator sequel.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
