The cyberpunk movies that built the genre on screen are Blade Runner (1982), Akira (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995) and The Matrix (1999), with The Terminator, RoboCop and the strange television experiment called Max Headroom running alongside them. In games, the line runs from Mike Pondsmith's tabletop Cyberpunk role-playing game to CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077. The newest chapter is Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which is out now on Netflix as of this week.
This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 covered the books, from Bruce Bethke naming the genre to William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Part 2 is about what happened when cyberpunk got a camera, a soundtrack and eventually a controller.
Blade Runner (1982): The Look Everyone Borrowed
Ridley Scott's Blade Runner premiered June 25, 1982. It adapts Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and sets the story in a rain-soaked Los Angeles in November 2019, where the Tyrell Corporation manufactures synthetic humans called replicants. Harrison Ford plays Rick Deckard; Rutger Hauer plays Roy Batty. Hauer rewrote Batty's final monologue, the "tears in rain" speech, and brought it to Scott on set.
The credits are a who's who of the cyberpunk aesthetic: concept artist Syd Mead, who also designed the flying "spinner" cars, Vangelis on synthesizer score, and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth. It cost about $30 million and earned $41.8 million at the box office on first release, and critics were split. Then it became a cult classic. Scott's Director's Cut (1992) removed the voice-over narration, The Final Cut (2007) became his definitive version, and Denis Villeneuve directed Blade Runner 2049 in 2017. As Part 1 noted, Gibson saw the first twenty minutes while writing Neuromancer and thought his novel was doomed. Both survived.
The Practical Effects Era: The Terminator and RoboCop
Strictly speaking, neither of these is pure cyberpunk. Both are close enough to share the furniture: a killer corporation, a machine that thinks and a city that has given up.
James Cameron's The Terminator (October 26, 1984) cost $6.4 million and grossed $78.3 million worldwide. Its villain is Skynet, a computer network built by Cyberdyne Systems that becomes self-aware. Film writer Paul Meehan credits it with originating "tech-noir," science fiction filmed like a noir. Stan Winston's team built the endoskeleton for real, from clay, steel-reinforced plaster and chrome plating. I do not love time travel as a plot device, and I will say so every time, but I will forgive a great deal for a practical chrome skeleton.
Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop (1987) is a corporate satire with a body count. A murdered Detroit cop is rebuilt as a cyborg by Omni Consumer Products, the megacorporation that also wants to run the police. The suit took six months to build and came in seven versions, and the ED-209 enforcement droid was a seven-foot articulated model animated in stop motion by Phil Tippett. The film made $53.4 million domestically and won an Academy Award for sound editing.
Max Headroom (1985): The Cyberpunk TV Experiment
Max Headroom debuted on Britain's Channel 4 on April 4, 1985, in the TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. He was billed as the first computer-generated TV presenter. He was not. Actor Matt Frewer wore foam latex prosthetics, a fiberglass suit and special contact lenses, and the "digital" effect came from harsh lighting and editing. His name came from a parking garage sign reading "MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3 M," the last thing his alter ego, journalist Edison Carter, saw before a crash. Max went on to sell Coca-Cola with the line "Catch the wave!" and to star in a 1987 American series often called the first cyberpunk TV show. In 1987 an unknown person in a Max Headroom mask hijacked broadcast signals in Chicago, and nobody has ever been identified.
Akira (1988) and Ghost in the Shell (1995): Japan Takes the Wheel
Akira
Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira premiered in Japan on July 16, 1988, adapted from his own manga. It is set in Neo-Tokyo in 2019 and follows Kaneda, a biker gang leader, whose friend Tetsuo develops catastrophic psychic powers after a motorcycle accident. The production budget was about ¥700 million. The animators used more than 160,000 cels, and Akira was the first anime to record its dialogue before animation so the lips could be drawn to match. It grossed about $49 million worldwide and changed how Western audiences saw anime.
Ghost in the Shell
Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, made by Production I.G from Masamune Shirow's 1989 manga, premiered November 18, 1995. It follows Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg agent hunting a hacker called the Puppet Master, and keeps asking what is left of a person once most of her is manufactured. Kenji Kawai's score opens with "Making of a Cyborg," built around choral vocals drawn from a traditional wedding song. It underperformed in theaters and then found its audience on home video. James Cameron praised it as the first animated science fiction film "to reach a level of literary excellence," and a 2017 live-action remake followed.
The Matrix (1999): Cyberpunk Goes Mainstream
The Wachowskis reportedly showed Ghost in the Shell to producer Joel Silver and said, "We wanna do that for real." The Matrix premiered March 31, 1999, on a $63 million budget, earned $473.3 million worldwide and won four Academy Awards: Film Editing, Sound, Sound Effects Editing and Visual Effects. It popularized "bullet time," built from a ring of still cameras fired in sequence. The green digital rain uses a custom typeface inspired by Japanese characters. Keanu Reeves played Neo, four years after playing Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic, which makes him cyberpunk's most reliable employee. Hold that thought.
The Screen Canon, Ranked
- 1. Blade Runner. The visual grammar every cyberpunk movie still uses.
- 2. Ghost in the Shell. The one most interested in philosophy.
- 3. Akira. The one that changed how the West saw anime.
- 4. The Matrix. The one your parents saw.
- 5. RoboCop. The satire that aged into documentary.
From Tabletop to Night City: Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk
The games begin with dice. Mike Pondsmith designed the tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk for R. Talsorian Games in 1988 (now called Cyberpunk 2013), followed by Cyberpunk 2020 in 1990, Cyberpunk V3.0 in 2005 and Cyberpunk Red in 2020, set in 2045. Its home is Night City, a fictional metropolis on the California coast. Players choose roles such as netrunners (hackers), solos (mercenaries), rockerboys (musicians) and nomads. Its signature rule is the Humanity Cost: every cybernetic upgrade chips away at your empathy, and too much leads to cyberpsychosis.
Cyberpunk 2077: The Launch and the Long Road Back
CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind The Witcher games, adapted Pondsmith's world into Cyberpunk 2077, released December 10, 2020, on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows and Stadia. You play V, a mercenary in Night City, with a digital ghost in your head: legendary rocker Johnny Silverhand, played by Keanu Reeves. So the man who played Johnny Mnemonic and Neo now haunts Night City, too.
The launch had severe technical problems, especially on older consoles. Sony removed the game from the PlayStation Store in December 2020 and did not restore it until June 2021, and the company later settled class-action lawsuits for $1.85 million. CD Projekt Red kept patching. Versions for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S followed in February 2022. In September 2023, Update 2.0 overhauled core systems alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion, which features Idris Elba as agent Solomon Reed. Ports for Nintendo Switch 2 and macOS followed in 2025, and a sequel is in development.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022)
Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red made Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a ten-episode anime directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi that premiered on Netflix on September 13, 2022. David Martinez, a street kid with an unusual tolerance for cyberware, falls in with a crew of edgerunners including Lucy, a netrunner who dreams of the Moon, and Rebecca. The opening theme is Franz Ferdinand's "This Fffire." It logged 14.88 million viewing hours in its first week, and within weeks Cyberpunk 2077 crossed 20 million copies sold, riding what the press called the Edgerunners wave. In 2023 it won Anime of the Year at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards.
Edgerunners 2: Out Now
CD Projekt Red announced a sequel series in July 2025, and according to the official Cyberpunk site, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 is out now, exclusively on Netflix. It is a ten-episode standalone series from CD Projekt Red and Trigger, not a continuation of David's story. Kai Ikarashi directs, Kanno Ichigo is lead character designer, and the story is by Bartosz Sztybor and Masahiko Otsuka. It follows Weak, a former edgerunner legend now living without cybernetic enhancements (voiced by Kentaro Tone), and D, a nomad seeking vengeance (Koki Uchiyama), with Roman (Momoka Terasawa) and Talia (Akari Kito). The official pitch promises "a new story, fresh characters, and an even more raw, brutal take on the world of the dark future."
Wearing Your Night City Allegiance
A cyberpunk shirt works like a crew patch: the person who spots it already knows the vocabulary. Our Terminator t-shirts category has the Skynet Logo, Glitch, VHS and Neon Terminator designs, and the RoboCop t-shirts category has ED-209, Schematic and Robo Neon. Gamers will find more in the video game t-shirts category, and our anime t-shirts category includes an original neon design called the Cyberpunk T-Shirt. For bigger frames, the plus size nerd shirts category covers the store.
Log Off, Briefly
Cyberpunk on screen started as a box office disappointment in the rain and ended up as a ten-episode anime that helped sell millions of copies of a video game. In between came chrome skeletons, a fake computer man and a ring of still cameras. Part 3 arrives Thursday and looks at the look itself: neon, synthwave and mirrored sunglasses. Until then, the classic cyberpunk movies are worth a rewatch, and Night City is still open.