Forget Altered Carbon, Prime Video's 'Blade Runner Meets Terminator' Series Could Be A Masterpiece

Published Sep 28, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020. Although Netflix’s Altered Carbon is one of the best and most ambitious cyberpunk shows to date, Prime Video’s upcoming blend of The Terminator and Blade Runner has the potential to be the greatest small-screen entry into the subgenre so far. For some shows, it’s just that the time is wrong, as Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler once opined about Shakespeare’s doomed couple in the song Romeo and Juliet. These series might be classics according to critics and well-loved by their fan bases, but they arrive either too early or too late to cash in on the transient popularity of their chosen subgenre. Oliver Stone and Kathryn Bigelow’s prescient sci-fi miniseries Wild Palms would have been a devastating slice of big-budget, R-rated satire in the early 2020s, but it was too wild and surreal for viewers in the early ‘90s. Similarly, Netflix’s Altered Carbon might have fared better had the cyberpunk series arrived a few years later. Based on the 2002 novel of the same name by author Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon follows political prisoner Takeshi Kovacs as he’s released from prison to solve a murder by the rich elite Meth Laurens Bancroft. Set over 350 years into the future, Altered Carbon takes place in a world where the rich can “resleeve,” putting their consciousness in a new body to evade mortality. Thus, the murder Bancroft wants Kovacs to solve is Bancroft’s own. It’s a killer premise, but one that never became a mainstream hit the way Prime Video’s upcoming Robocop reboot could. Prime Video’s Robocop Could Be The Greatest Cyberpunk Series Yet Everett Heavily inspired by earlier cyberpunk writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, Morgan’s novel and its two-season Netflix adaptation are twisty, unpredictable, and immersive, with Altered Carbon making its trippy future feel equal parts lived-in and alien. Sadly, Netflix’s Altered Carbon was also ahead of its time, arriving before cyberpunk TV shows became viable as a mainstream proposition. While the earliest notable cyberpunk novels, like Gibson’s Neuromancer and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, date back to the early ‘80s, the subgenre has always struggled to win over mainstream readers and viewers. Even one of the greatest cybperunk movies ever, director Ridley Scott’s Dick adaptation Blade Runner, was a critically divisive commercial failure upon its original release. Now, the Blade Runner franchise is popular enough to spawn an upcoming Prime Video reboot, Blade Runner 2099, while cyberpunk as a whole is popular enough for Apple TV to invest heavily in an upcoming Neuromancer adaptation. Within this context, the news that Prime Video is rebooting the Robocop movie franchise as a streaming series shouldn’t come as a shock, since Total Recall director Paul Verhoeven’s original 1987 movie Robocop is another cyberpunk cult classic. Robocop’s Reboot Has One Thing Many Short-Lived Cyberpunk Shows Were Missing Gritty, unapologetically R-rated, and gruesome, Verhoeven’s Robocop takes satirical aim at militarized policing with its over-the-top story of a half-man, half-robot super cop designed to wipe out a futuristic city’s out-of-control criminal gangs. While director José Padilha already helmed a movie reboot of the Robocop franchise back in 2014, Prime Video’s Robocop reboot will be produced by Blumhouse Atomic Monster. With Robocop’s original co-creators and co-writers, Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier, on board as executive producers, Prime Video’s Robocop series sounds like a worthy follow-up to the original movies. Furthermore, the series has one thing that Netflix’s Altered Carbon and Prime Video’s equally underrated 2022 cyberpunk series The Peripheral sorely lacked, and that is the benefit of brand recognition. The Robocop franchise is massive, with movie sequels, kid’s TV show spinoffs, animated shows, the aforementioned remake, and far more toys than an R-rated, mature action movie would be expected to spawn. As such, Prime Video’s Robocop could last longer than earlier cyberpunk shows like Altered Carbon thanks to its recognizable brand. Release Date July 17, 1987 Runtime 102 minutes Director Paul Verhoeven Cast Peter Weller Officer Alex J. Murphy / RoboCop Nancy Allen Officer Anne Lewis Writers Edward Neumeier, Michael Miner Producers Arne Schmidt