Apple TV+ recently announced Murderbot (starring Alexander Skarsgård), but that isn’t the only heavyweight title coming to beef up the tech giant’s sci-fi offerings. Of course, the streaming service already has Sunny, Invasion, Foundation, For All Mankind and Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters under that label, not to mention the upcoming second seasons of the atypical worldbuilding on display in both Severance, and Silo, but now, Apple TV+ will be adapting a more challenging cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer.
You heard that right, and it’s a gamble. Let’s piece together some tidbits.
Plot
William Gibson’s debut novel, Neuromancer, is a seminal work that has been bestowed with the Philip K. Dick Award among other coveted honors and has inspired film directors, video game designers, and countless novels over the decades. Can this 1980s console-cowboys classic really work on the small screen?
Adapting this project will be a doozy, but that’s an understatement. Multiple efforts have been made over the decades to do so, including an abandoned Fox effort from Tim Miller (Deadpool) and Simon Kinberg (X-Men). In fact, the book has been called “unfilmable” for so long that it seemed that cyberpunk circles would never see Neuromancer onscreen, but Hollywood can never say never forever. Also, if Frank Herbert’s Dune can (finally) spawn a pair of successful WBD movies and another in the works, then anything is possible.
Early this year, Apple TV+ issued a a press release that revealed plans for a 10-episode first season co-created by Graham Roland (AMC’s Dark Winds, Amazon’s Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and JD Dillard (HBO’s The Outsider). In a joint statement, the pair declared, “[T]his collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that’s come after it and we’re looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson’s definitive ‘cyberpunk’ world.”
For Neuromancer, Callum Turner (Apple TV+’s recent Masters Of The Air) will embody hacker/”cowboy” Case, who will ride his console through cyberspace, and a brief series description follows:
The series will follow a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly, a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.
Thus far, further plot details on this series remain hush hush as far as how closely the series will follow Gibson’s novel, but it’s worth noting that, if successful, this could potentially be a multisession effort. The author did, after all, complete his Sprawl trilogy with two other books, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, for future reference.
Cast
Callum Turner will be joined by Briana Middleton as Molly. That leaves a bevy of other characters without casting news yet, but the cyber-night is young.
Release Date
Apple TV+ is growing ever-more serious about their sci-fi with a number of newly announced titles, but at this time, Neuromancer does not have a projected release date.
Trailer
As with this streaming service’s other sci-fi offerings, expect the production values to be top notch, in contrast to, say, Hackers starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie.