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.