By Joshua Tyler
| Updated 1 hour ago
Michelle Yeoh is moving on to another science fiction franchise. She’s set to star in a new Blade Runner TV series called Blade Runner 2099. It’s expected on Amazon Prime Video in 2026.
In it, she’ll play a blade runner, like the one Harrison Ford played in the original iconic movie. Basically, while it’s not the same character Ford played exactly, they’re gender swapping the franchise. I’m calling it a soft gender swap.
Michelle Yeoh in Star Trek: Section 31
It’s an interesting decision to turn Blade Runner over to Michelle Yeoh in an environment where even Disney has reportedly begun questioning what they need to do differently to court men. Men don’t like gender-swapping characters, and they have never supported it with their wallets. It’s been tried a lot recently, and there’s not a single example of success.
Blade Runner is popular almost exclusively with males. Michelle Yeoh is fresh from making Star Trek: Section 31, the most hated entry in another franchise primarily popular with men.
Hunter Schaffer in The Hunger Games: Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes
Co-starring opposite Yeoh will be Hunter Schaffer, a trans woman and highly vocal trans rights activist, specifically an advocate for allowing trans women in women’s restrooms and on girls’ sports teams. Whether you or I agree with Hunter’s activism or not, nearly all polling suggests men do not agree with it. Polls often deliver numbers as high as 60-80% disagreement from men on those issues.
Blade Runner 2099’s showrunner is Silka Luisa, who most recently produced the Halo TV series for Paramount. The Halo show was a disaster, canceled after two seasons due to poor ratings and mocked by fans for its ridiculousness and terribleness. The woman responsible for that has been put in charge of Blade Runner 2099. Halo, by the way, is another franchise whose audience is 95% male.
One of many boring scenes from the Halo TV series
So what’s happened here is Amazon has taken a franchise that only men are interested in, and cast a woman who recently ruined another male-focused franchise to take over a traditionally male role, and then paired her with someone who is best known as an advocate for things men are adamantly opposed to. Then they’ve hired a woman best known for ruining another sci-fi franchise to run it.
Maybe Amazon thinks this will be the first entry in the Blade Runner franchise to be a hit with women. It’s hard to imagine that happening in a world where Disney couldn’t get women to support their slate of female superheroes. Getting women invested in cyberpunk noir is several degrees of difficulty harder.
Despite a lot of recent noise about a return to making entertainment with men in mind as an audience, it seems clear Hollywood still has no idea what a man is.