This has been a busy week for Michelle Yeoh. The Star Trek: Discovery (and upcoming Section 31 streaming movie) star is following up her new Presidential Medal of Freedom with news she will be starring in the new Blade Runner TV series. She also turned heads on the Met Gala red carpet with her unique gown.
Yeoh 2099
The Hollywood trades are reporting that Amazon has tapped Michelle Yeoh as one of the leads for their upcoming Blade Runner 2099 limited series. The new show follows the events of the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the 1982 classic film Blade Runner based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
From Blade Runner 2049 (Warner Bros.)
In the dystopian future depicted in Blade Runner humanity has developed androids named “replicants” as workers and when one goes rogue they are tracked down by bounty hunters called “blade runners.” According to Variety, in Blade Runner 2099 Yeoh will play a character named Olwen, “described as a replicant near the end of her life.”
Blade Runner 2099 is set to start filming in Prague in June. In March Yeoh wrapped up filming on the upcoming Star Trek: Section 31 streaming movie where she returns to the role of Emperor Georgiou from Discovery. Paramount+ has yet to set a release date for Section 31.
Michelle Yeoh as Georgiou and Joe Pingue as Dada Noe in Star Trek: Section 31 (Paramount+)
Met Gala Yeoh
Yeoh was also getting noticed on Monday when the Oscar-winning actress walked the red carpet in a dress made of aluminum a the Met Gala in New York, which had a theme this year of “Garden of Time.”
Yeoh’s gown was designed by the Spanish luxury fashion house Balenciaga. You can see how they put it together in the video below.
Bonus Yeoh
And from even more Michelle, today Paramount+ released this video tribute to her time on Star Trek: Discovery.
Keep up with news about the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com
I just knew that first image of the Section 31 movie was secretly from Blade Runner!
A Blade Runner series that follows the 2049 instalment sounds intriguing and I’m all in when it comes to Michelle Yeoh. IMO to have someone of her acting calibre in the Star Trek family is one of the highlights of so called nu-Trek.
Canny choice of brand ambassador to rehabilitate Balenciaga.
-Michelle Yeoh is awesome
-so paramount writes her off of disco to spin her off
-then covid happens then paramount has a meltdown and we wait
-she wins an oscar as we wait
-then finally they do a tv movie because she’s too busy and can’t possibly do a scifi series for a streaming service
-now she’s doing a scifi series with a streaming service
the decisions out of paramount for 2 years have been flat out weird
she was always going to leave.
see how busy she is away from Disc now.
that’s hilarious… that’s like the saying close the spacedock doors now that the horse has left and suffocated in space… she left to do her own show… she left pre oscar and pre everything… then covid hit then paramount flipped a switch on themselves then paramount was selling itself… and now she’s making a totally different scifi streaming series in a different franchise… i think it’s hilarious too
Funny how she was apparently too busy to do the Section 31 show she signed to do way back in 2019 by being in a dozen other shows lol.
Anyway this sounds great. I really liked the Blade Runner sequel. I only seen it once in n the theater but I was hoping for another movie. But since that basically bombed this is a great alternative.
Yeah, but asides from management talking about a S31 show, it’s not like there were a dozen scripts at the ready for season one to get started. How many times has Paramount announced the Trek IV movie was all queued up and ready to go……except it wasn’t?
I wish her the best…
Actually there was a lot of progress. They had already finished the pilot and the first few scripts literally back in 2019.
Taken from a previous article:
“We are very excited about the Section 31 show and Michelle Yeoh is excited to do it. She is in the current season of Discovery so she’s working on that right now but we have scripts getting written, and Alex has a writer’s room. We love what we’ve heard so far. It’s yet another tonality of Trek. As Alex has mapped it all out, each show has its own unique sort of voice and vision.”
S31 was literally being made the same time Picard was. They already had showrunners and scripts.
I think just like the movies themselves Paramount got cold feet and backed off because they clearly wasn’t that confident in it. Understandable. Of course at least they finally did something with the idea unlike the next movie. 🙄
Lack of confidence in the scripts perhaps? Also probably not enough money to go around now to make good on it, especially if her fee went up.
I saw BR2049 at the cinema on a Friday night opening wkend 2017, not that many in theatre, remember my mind blown during opening titles, it just hitting me, I was actually watching Blade Runner 2 (starring Harrison Ford). It’d already been mind blowing watching Force Awakens in cinema, but this was just beyond crazy (a shame it wasn’t directed by Scott, probably would’ve been a tighter film, although DV did very well. In fact I liked it so much I put off watching the bluray for a few years bc i didn’t want to dilute that one time cinema experience).
Pity this series isn’t a 3rd film (with Yeoh), stream series can’t really compare to a proper film imo (Picard s3 aside)
Yeah I remember sitting in the theater Saturday night opening weekend with I think 50 other people lol.
I was actually a bit surprised how low the turnout was but I guess I shouldn’t be since the first movie was always more of a cult thing but still loved it. But I’m glad they still tried to go bigger with it.
And yeah would’ve loved another movie but the writing was on the wall.
BTW I know they made an animated series for it too. Have you ever seen it? I’m thinking of watching it but I want to watch the movies again first.
It’s nice they haven’t abandoned the franchise even though it’s never been popular for the masses.
No not seen any of the animated series, think there was some anime stuff on the blu extras when I finally got around to looking at it
Think BR2 probably ended up making similar to BR1 when adjusted
If you haven’t seen it, SLICE OF LIFE is a short that takes place in the BLADE RUNNER universe, with some amazing visuals produced entirely with miniatures (no cgi). You can check it out on YouTube.
They do a better job of shooting the miniatures than 2049 did, too. The shot(s) in 2049 of what I think was the police building really looked model-ly. I’ve got a used blu-ray of it, but when I tried to rewatch I dozed off 10min in and haven’t worked up enthusiasm to give it another go.
Yeoh and Ford would be a lovely combo. Spielberg had initially talked to her about being in Indiana Jones 4, around when she was doing Memoirs of a Geisha. Wasn’t too serious as no iteration of the script really had a part for an Asian actress, but it would have been fun.
when Spielberg was attached to Indy 5 i think it had a China based plot (an art guy Adam Brockbank posted his concept art when he was attached to Spielbergs version of IJ5 and some was of young Indy in a Chinese type temple , and also a Nazi submarine with Indy and what looks to be Felicity Jones or Ana De Armes) then when Mangold took over he did a complete rewrite and new ‘mcguffin’ the Dial of Destiny .
Thanks for sharing. I had no idea that IJ5 under Spielberg had gotten that far down the development road.
funny, she would have been in an Indy film and an Indy knock off ‘mummy’ film
Oh god, I forgot she was in that Mummy film. What a waste. Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li are finally given their one and only fight on film and it’s a brief, boringly shot and edited damp squib of a scene.
The Forbidden Kingdom isn’t a great movie. But at least they knew to make the most of Jet Li and Jackie Chan fighting each other.
Seems like another recycle stuff from the 80s and expect us all not to notice kind of thing again.
Since I thought that, despite some virtues, BLADE RUNNER 2049 was an almost entirely unnecessary sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, I’m finding this announcement more intriguing than I probably should.
There’ve been so many ALTERED CARBON cyberwhatsis SF projects since BR, and from what I remember, I don’t think I dug too many of them. Maybe they should have gotten Noah Hawley locked in before he got enmeshed in doing an ALIEN tv series for Fox, have a feeling he could have upped the game considerably.
As previously stated I definitely thought 2049 had its pluses, including the relationship between Gosling and his holographic love interest, which for my money brilliantly restated the original’s question about what it means to be human. If only the rest had been that good. . . but, seriously, what do we need with more cyberpunk dystopias anyhow? We’re walking around in one, 24/7, with full surround sound, smell-o-vision, and Marjorie Taylor Greene for black comic relief. Or, as cyberpunk guru Bill Gibson once put it, “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”
I’d only be able to consider MTG as black comic relief if we were living in a BACK TO THE FUHRER timeline.
That’s a joke I came up with when I read that ENT time traveled back to ww2 to fight aliens working with nazis. Finally got a chance to use it.
That would have been a good title indeed for those preposterous episodes. (Did they air in the springtime, btw? Okay, I’ll stop.)
Reading that had me laughing so hard I started hallucinating Dick Shawn as ‘God’ and then as Sybok in ST5. That’s probably the first time I’ve even thought of Dick Shawn this whole century!
I don’t think there’s any need to explain the plot of Blade Runner to this audience ;)
Can no longer support her after her appearance at the met gala while children die indiscriminately thanks to American tax dollars.
That’s been the reality for generations now, sadly — children dying with the aid of American tax dollars. I’m not sure what Yeoh’s participation in cultural events does to change that, but of course YMMV. (And I’ll be honest here: I’d feel a lot different about her accepting that award from TFG.)