7. Neuromancer - William Gibson
Poor Gibson has not fared well in Hollywood so far. Johnny Mnemonic is legendary in its mediocrity, and New Rose Hotel barely clears 4.5 stars on IMDb. Doesn't the godfather of cyberpunk deserve better than that? I should say so. To be fair, his influence in the way we use and envision the Internet is maybe a better legacy than any movie could be; indeed, any movie about computers, hackers, or the Internet made after 1984 probably owes some small (or even large) part of its aesthetic to Gibson and Neuromancer. If nothing else, one could argue that Gibson is just as much responsible for The Matrix as the Wachowskis (or the woman who claims to be the
Mother of the Matrix, whichever claim to authorship you happen to prefer). Maybe Neuromancer doesn't need to be a movie because it's in so many. That's a fair philosophical point to make, I suppose, but if they announced plans for a Neuromancer movie I would still be excited. I'm already interested to see how the recently announced Pattern Recognition movie will do. It's a different beast from the dystopic SF future of Neuromancer, and Anthony Peckham (Sherlock Holmes, Invictus) is on board to adapt it to a screenplay. With any luck, even if it won't be a proper Neuromancer movie, it will at least be a proper William Gibson movie.