Altered Carbon Release Date and First-Look Images for Netflix Series Are Here

Need a new body? Netflix is about to have you covered. Death is merely an inconvenience in the new sci-fi noir series Altered Carbon. The cyberpunk TV series, based on a 2002 novel of the same name, will release on February 2nd, 2018, Netflix announced in a release date teaser video.

Altered Carbon (the TV Series) is set more than 300 years in the future where consciousness can be digitized and basically put on a memory card called a “stack.” The human body becomes more like clothing, and people can enter different bodies called “sleeves.”

The series follows a solider named Takeshi Kovacs, played by Will Yun Lee (The Wolverine) and Joel Kinnaman (Suicide Squad), who is the last survivor of an elite group of interstellar warriors who were defeated in an uprising against the new world order. Kovacs’ mind was imprisoned, or “on ice,” for centuries, until a wealthy man named Laurens Bancroft (played by James Purefoy) offers Kovacs the chance to live again if he helps solve a murder… of who killed Bancroft himself. 

Netflix released an annoucement video with the first clips from Altered Carbon:

They also dropped the first still images from the series: 

In one of the first real efforts to bring the cyberpunk genre to television, Netflix ordered Richard K. Morgan’s classic 2002 novel Altered Carbon to series in early 2016. With Laeta Kalogridis, co-writer of Avatar and Terminator Genisys attached as executive producer and showrunner, the series finally follows through on an earlier attempt to get a movie script picked up.

Altered Carbon (the novel) takes place in the 25th century when humanity has spread across the universe, and technology has advanced to the point where personalities can be stored digitally and transferred from body to body. The story follows a longtime imprisoned warrior, Takeshi Kovacs, who is “re-sleeved” into a body to investigate a murder and have a chance to regain his freedom and his life.

In addition to its cyberpunk pedigree, Altered Carbon is also considered a noir drama, which has been Netflix’s fare of choice lately with successes like Jessica Jones and Daredevil as well as avant garde fare such as Sense8.