Despite its success, Netflix's Cyberpunk anime was always planned as a one-off.
Netflix anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners showed up to give Cyberpunk 2077 quite a stim in the arm last month, but it was a one-time boost: CD Projekt has made it clear there’s no second season of the show in the works; Edgerunners was conceived from the beginning as a one-off.
That may be a surprise if you’ve witnessed the effect Edgerunners has had on CD Projekt’s RPG. The energetic series by Studio Trigger made me consider giving the game another try, and I was hardly alone. Edgerunners was a big hit, spawning tons of mods, and an accompanying game update helped propel the RPG back up into the most-played games on Steam where it’s held strong for over a month now. Wouldn’t CD Projekt want to keep that gravy train rolling?
It’s possible CD Projekt is now regretting the single-season plan, but that was the plan. In a Famitsu interview translated by VGC, CD Projekt Red‘s Satoru Honma said that he “would like to continue to work with Japanese studios to produce more anime in the future, partly because we have received very good feedback.” But then he drove the point home: “Just to be clear, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was planned as a standalone work.”
If you’ve watched the series or followed the history of Studio Trigger, this news should have you nodding along. Edgerunners tells a complete story, and Studio Trigger director and co-founder Hiroyuki Imaishi (who headed up Edgerunners) doesn’t tend to work on sequels.
All that said, I’d also bet that CD Projekt and Netflix both underestimated how popular Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was going to be, or what a boon it would end up being to Cyberpunk 2077. Given Honma’s comment above and a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel on the way, we probably haven’t seen the last of Cyberpunk anime on Netflix.
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