Apple’s 2026 Neuromancer show would be much better as a cyberpunk anime

Of course, Gibson wasn’t the only writer to sculpt this now-oversaturated subgenre, but Neuromancer shaped the cyberpunk landscape for decades to come. Everything from Ghost in the Shell to Cyberpunk: Edgerunners owes a debt to Gibson, as the book ventures beyond genre aesthetics to carve out a dystopian ethos filled with cyberhackers and AI antagonists. Numerous attempts have been made to adapt Neuromancer into film, with the likes of music-video director Chris Cunningham and Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice, In the Tall Grass) being attached at some point. But none of these efforts bore fruit, as the novel’s eccentric worldbuilding proved unadaptable to the big screen.

What we do have, however, is an upcoming Neuromancer television adaptation coming to Apple TV in 2026, with Callum Turner (Eternity) assuming the role of ex-corporate hacker Henry Dorsett Case. Apple released a brief teaser trailer for the 10-episode series on the book’s 41st anniversary, featuring a first look at Chatsubo, an expat bar Case frequents. While Apple might surprise us with a competent Neuromancer adaptation, the series faces an uphill battle for the same reasons other filmmakers failed: Neuromancer defies live-action treatment and feels uniquely suited to the boundless flexibility and fluid dynamism of the animated medium.

Neuromancer opens with a despondent Case at the Chatsubo. A former console jockey (professionals who hack into cyberspace) who got caught stealing from his employers, Case has been punished for his transgressions with a deadly neurotoxin injected into his spinal cord. This robs him of the ability to access cyberspace, leaving him increasingly reckless and on-edge. When a mercenary named Molly approaches Case with a lifeline, he must take part in a high-risk heist in return for a shot at a future that isn’t bleak or completely devoid of meaning. As the heist team grows, Case crosses paths with an AI entity named Wintermute, whose very existence is an anomaly even within the futuristic world of Gibson’s novels.

A cursory look at Neuromancer makes the limitations of a live-action interpretation apparent. Consider the following passage where Case ponders the nature of cyberspace and the crux of his anxieties as an ex-console jockey:

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void […] The Sprawl was a long, strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy […] But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.

Gibson’s knack for penning vivid passages turns Neuromancer into a prime opportunity for exaggerated animation, where futuristic concepts like the matrix, coffin hotels, and cyberspace consoles can come to life. Once Case agrees to the heist, he spends most of his time inside cyberspace, which Gibson describes as a “consensual hallucination” that resembles a complex neural network. Cyberpunk 2077 features a similar technology called the Net, which houses data and digital personalities. This abstraction works in a video game, but the moment we try to envision cyberspace in live-action, it doesn’t feel cutting-edge anymore, defaulting to bland and derivative visual inspiration.

Image: CD Projekt Red

(The only notable exception to this is The Matrix movies, which draw immensely from Neuromancer but pull their own weight by reinventing cyberspace as a literal and ideological prison. The Wachowskis opt for a dramatic and stylistic approach to sell the same premise, which absolutely works within the context of the dense worldbuilding in these films.)

Neuromancer is also a globe-trotting affair. Case and the heist team travel to distant underworlds (even venturing into orbital space stations) to carry out missions, extract data, and hijack cybersystems. These mini-worlds are characterized by distinct demographics that transcend traditional aesthetics.

Take Molly as an example. Her eyes are replaced by inlaid mirror lenses with vision-enhancement properties, replete with a clock readout chipped into her optic nerve. Omitting this aspect of her character is unthinkable, as her mirror lenses inform her formidable nature as a mercenary. There’s also heist member Peter Riviera, who can project images into people’s brains and temporarily alter their reality. These character quirks run the risk of looking unconvincing in the same way hyperbolic imagery in anime often looks goofy in live-action adaptations, like in Netflix’s iteration of Kakegurui, or Death Note.

Image: Juan Gimenez

It’s definitely possible to create lush cyberpunk cityscapes for film and television alike, given how impactful Blade Runner or Altered Carbon have been as franchises. That said, Gibson’s Neuromancer has always felt like an exception. The animated medium is a promising avenue to bring Sprawl’s fascinating world to our screens, while still doing justice to the trilogy’s scathing critique of global capitalism and consumer-based identities.

While Apple’s Neuromancer might fare much better than The Peripheral or Another Life (two recent live-action shows that fell flat due to their shoddy treatment of sci-fi tropes), the series will have to get really inventive to recreate the enthralling premise of Gibson’s novels. In cyberpunk parlance, the upcoming Neuromancer needs to shine like new chrome to be able to make an indelible mark.