Adaptations, Made and Unmade

Morgan wrote the first novel in his evenings and weekends while teaching English as a foreign language, and Gollancz published it in 2002. Hollywood moved fast. He heard of studio interest at the London Book Fair, a Los Angeles agency took the book on, and that year Warner Bros. optioned the film rights for Joel Silver, the producer of The Matrix. The press called it a million dollars. Morgan corrected that in 2004 — “it wasn’t a million in point of fact” — but it was about ten times more money than he had ever seen at once, and on the option money alone he left his university teaching post that autumn.

He wanted no part of the screenplay. “I sold my soul on this one,” he said: Warner could do exactly what it liked. The screenwriter was John Pogue, writing for Silver, and when Morgan was shown a draft, within a year or so, he was impressed that it kept a very large share of the novel’s detail. Asked about casting, he named no favourite, only a type, something like Lee Marvin in Point Blank: a Kovacs who looks damaged and dangerous.

An option has to be renewed or let go. In 2005 Morgan wrote that “The film option expires (again) in November”, so Warner had renewed it at least once, and now had to buy, let go or renegotiate. It held on without making anything. The writers’ strike of 2007–08 stalled the project, and in 2009 the director James McTeigue, of V for Vendetta, said he still hoped to make it with Silver, from a script he had been developing for a while. Laeta Kalogridis, who would make the series, later summed up the studio’s thinking in one line: “The edict at [Warner Bros.] was to make a PG-13 movie out of it.” A novel that opens with its hero shot dead and later has him tortured in virtuality was never going to be PG-13. In The Hollywood Reporter’s words the project sat in development purgatory for nearly a decade, and then the option lapsed.

Kalogridis, the screenwriter of Shutter Island, had long wanted the book. When Warner’s rights lapsed she phoned Morgan and pitched him a “hard R-rated” adaptation, and he was sold. In February 2012 Variety reported that Mythology Entertainment, the company she had just founded with Brad Fischer and James Vanderbilt, had the feature rights, the other Kovacs novels included. She and David H. Goodman wrote a screenplay on spec and tried to sell it for years.

No studio bought it. They were not queueing to pay for an R-rated, complicated science-fiction film tied to no franchise, and the story would not go into two hours: to Kalogridis it was like cutting Lawrence of Arabia to half its length. What changed the plan was television: closed-ended series such as FX’s Fargo caught the eye of Kalogridis and of Skydance’s chief creative officer, Dana Goldberg, who took the project to Cindy Holland at Netflix, and on 20 January 2016 Netflix ordered ten episodes, with Skydance Television as the studio and Kalogridis writing, executive producing and running the show. The rights had gone from Orion Publishing Group, Gollancz’s parent, to Mythology and then to Skydance.

Season 1 arrived all at once on 2 February 2018: ten episodes shot in Vancouver, reported to be Netflix’s most expensive production to that date, with Joel Kinnaman as Kovacs in Elias Ryker’s sleeve and Morgan as a consultant. The production designer Carey Meyer built Bay City’s street market indoors, in an old printing-press building. The season keeps the first novel’s murder case and rebuilds much around it: Quellcrist Falconer, a figure from history in the novel, becomes Kovacs’s lover and the leader of the Envoys, now rebels rather than the Protectorate’s troops; Reileen Kawahara is his sister; and the Hendrix hotel becomes the Raven, run by an AI in the persona of Edgar Allan Poe.

Netflix renewed it on 27 July 2018 for eight episodes with a new Kovacs, Anthony Mackie; in a story about changing bodies, a new lead is the premise. Alison Schapker became sole showrunner in May 2019, and Kalogridis stayed on as an executive producer. Season 2, released on 27 February 2020, goes to Harlan’s World on the spine of Woken Furies, with names from Broken Angels; Kalogridis said Morgan spent a couple of weeks in the writers’ room helping them use the second book without its vastness. It had less money than the first, Meyer said, because the show’s success was smaller than Netflix had hoped.

That was the end of it. Netflix decided in April 2020 not to order a third season, and Deadline reported it on 26 August: not because of COVID, but through the streamer’s routine weighing of viewers against cost. Season 2 ends with a backup of Kovacs’s mind waiting for a sleeve the show never got to give it.

On 8 November 2018, at a showcase in Singapore, Netflix announced an anime set in the series’ world, and Altered Carbon: Resleeved came out on 19 March 2020, three weeks after season 2. It is a 74-minute Japanese feature from the studio Anima, directed by Jō (also romanized Takeru) Nakajima and Yoshiyuki Okada and written by Dai Satō and Tsukasa Kondō. It adapts no novel. Set on the planet Latimer about 250 years before season 1, it sends Kovacs, in a new sleeve, to guard a teenage tattooist inside a yakuza clan, beside a CTAC officer who is secretly Reileen: the series’ continuity, furnished from the books. Reviews were mixed; IGN gave it 6 out of 10. It remains the franchise’s only film and its last screen release. The Resleeved page has the whole story.

Morgan came back to Kovacs himself in comics. Dynamite Entertainment took the comics licence through Gollancz in July 2017, and in March 2019 announced Altered Carbon: Download Blues, the first original graphic novel set in the franchise, written by Morgan with Rik Hoskin (Hoskin’s story, their joint script) and drawn by Ferran Sellares; the hardcover reached comic shops on 26 June 2019. It is a detective story with plenty of action. A man dies in a hotel room after a night with three women; his bodyguard, an ex-Envoy, will not talk; and Kovacs, in a nearby cell for brawling, is asked to help question him. The comic, Morgan said, has “a much higher pulse rate than the novels or the show”.

The second, Altered Carbon: One Life, One Death, is Scott Bryan Wilson’s story, drawn by Max Fuchs, with Morgan credited beside Wilson and keeping watch over the world’s continuity; the plot, he said, is “pretty much entirely Scott’s creation”. Kovacs is locked in a prison, in a weak body and missing a stretch of memory, and learns that Envoys he served with have been sold to one of the richest people in the universe. It was a long time coming. Dynamite solicited the 120-page hardcover for 10 February 2021, and Space.com, interviewing Morgan that March, reported it already in stores; but Diamond, the comics distributor, kept moving its date, to April and then August 2021, to March 2022, and it reached comic shops on 18 May 2022 and bookshops later that month. Neither book adapts a novel; both are new cases, and no single-issue Altered Carbon series has been found.

In April 2019 Skydance licensed Hunters Entertainment to make a tabletop roleplaying game based on the Netflix series. Altered Carbon: The Roleplaying Game opened on Kickstarter on 3 February 2020, passed its $20,000 goal in about two hours, and closed on 4 March with $372,547 from 3,940 backers. Bay City is its default setting. Its best idea is the books’ own: every character is split between a sleeve, which holds Strength and Perception, and a digital mind, which holds Empathy, Acuity, Willpower and Intelligence, and Ego points track the risk that changing bodies will fracture the mind. The core rulebook followed in hardcover from Renegade Game Studios.

The card game went back to the novels. On 12 August 2020 Warcradle Studios announced an official card game, made with Orion Publishing Group: Altered Carbon: Fightdrome, two players fighting in the Panama Rose, the old ship moored in the bay where the first novel’s Kovacs is made to fight, planned as the first of a series of arenas. It reached shops as Fightdrome: Panama Rose, a half-hour game for two. No Altered Carbon video game or VR game has been found; Morgan writes for games, as lead writer on Crysis 2 (2011) among others, but not about Kovacs.

In March 2021 Morgan told Space.com that “the Netflix show is put to bed, at least for the foreseeable future”, and probably any more anime with it. Cyberpunk on screen costs as much as any science fiction, he said, but its morally grey, noirish outlook does not pull in the young-adult and superhero crowds. Fans could keep their fingers crossed for a reboot.

They are still crossing them. As of October 2026 no revival, reboot or new film has been announced. A CBR opinion piece of December 2025 and a ScreenRant piece of February 2026 treat the show as finished, and ScreenRant still lists it as streaming on Netflix; a CBR piece of 12 October 2026 says simply that it “ended after two seasons in 2020”. There is no new Kovacs novel either. Morgan said in 2005 he would “rather quit while I’m ahead”, and in 2020 that he had stopped so the series would not feel tired, not because Kovacs had run out of work. The second graphic novel, in May 2022, was the last licensed product. What remains, complete, is where it began: three novels, still in print.