Forget Daniel Radcliffe's Harry Potter Comeback, I Need A Sequel To His 7-Year-Old Cyberpunk Movie

Published Sep 6, 2026, 3:59 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. While calls for Daniel Radcliffe to return to the Harry Potter franchise persist, the actor’s true calling is coming back for a sequel to his underrated 2019 cyberpunk classic. Since his earliest roles in the Harry Potter movies, Daniel Radcliffe’s screen career has been one of the most impressively unpredictable in Hollywood history. While HBO’s upcoming Harry Potter reboot aims to be the definitive screen version of the famous children’s book series, its stars will struggle to emulate Radcliffe's truly wild career trajectory. Immediately after the final movie in the original franchise, Radcliffe starred in the bizarre horror comedy Horns and the poignant Lucien Carr biopic Kill Your Darlings, in which he played a young version of the famous poet Allen Ginsberg. The years that followed saw Radcliffe play a water-logged corpse in Swiss Army Man, Frankenstein’s famous assistant Igor in Victor Frankenstein, himself in the experimental comedy Lost in London, and an FBI agent posing as a Neo-Nazi in Imperium. If that sounds like a wild rundown, it is perhaps worth noting that this only accounts for Radcliffe’s movies between 2014 and 2017. Since then, Radcliffe has voiced an imperious, tyrannical pet butterfly in Pizza Movie, played novelty musician Weird Al Yankovic in 2022’s parodic biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and played a computer programmer who is dragged into a murderous online fight club against his will in 2019’s wild Guns Akimbo. Guns Akimbo Deserved The Sequel Its Ending Set Up Guns Akimbo begins with Radcliffe’s unassuming programmer Miles logging on to a streaming platform that live streams death matches and insulting the broadcast’s bloodthirsty, vile viewers. This earns him the attention of the international criminal overlord behind the platform, who has Miles drugged and thrown into the game, where he must compete to survive against Samara Weaving’s deadpan, unstoppable assassin, Nix. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately for Miles, his captors have helpfully bolted a loaded gun to each of his hands, giving the movie its title. What follows is a deliriously violent cyberpunk thriller that eschews the slow-burn paranoia and world building of earlier genre outings like Blade Runner and Altered Carbon in favour of constant, frenetic action. Calling to mind earlier R-rated pulse pounders like the Crank movies, Shoot ‘Em Up, and Hardcore Henry, Guns Akimbo is a garish, nonstop thrill ride that's as violent and loud as it is darkly funny. In the years since Guns Akimbo was released, movies like Boy Kills World, Novacaine, Bullet Train, Gunpowder Milkshake, the Nowhere franchise, and Jolt have all borrowed its bloody blend of ultra violence, over-the-top character comedy, and dark satire. However, the futuristic storyline of Guns Akimbo gives the Radcliffe vehicle an edge that is missing from many of these later fusions of comedy, action, and thrills. Daniel Radcliffe Shouldn't Return To The Wizarding World Where the likes of Netflix’s aforementioned Altered Carbon and Apple TV’s upcoming Neuromancer adaptation are more concerned with exploring their fictional worlds in depth, Guns Akimbo manages to recapture the nonstop, dizzying experience of reading classic cyberpunk literature thanks to its hyper-aggressive filmmaking style. While some critics found this approach numbing, there is no denying the reality that the aesthetic is an effective way to encapsulate the overwhelming sensory thrills of cyberpunk writing at its best. As such, a sequel to Guns Akimbo, which sadly suffered at the box office since it was released in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, would be far better than Radcliffe’s potential return to the Wizarding World. The actor has commendably publicly condemned Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling’s very public history of transphobia, and his risky career choices like Guns Akimbo deserve to be supported more than an already-massive franchise retreading its existing storyline ad nauseam. Release Date February 27, 2020 Runtime 98 minutes Director Jason Lei Howden Writers Jason Lei Howden Producers Felipe Marino, Joe Neurauter, Tom Hern