Netflix’s First Philip K. Dick Show Will Make Blade Runner Look Optimistic

Published Sep 20, 2026, 4:45 PM EDT Dhruv is a Lead Writer in Screen Rant's New TV division. He has been consistently contributing to the website for over two years and has written thousands of articles covering streaming trends, movie/TV analysis, and pop culture breakdowns. Before Screen Rant, he was a Senior Writer for The Cinemaholic, covering everything from anime to television, from reality TV to movies. After high school, he was on his way to become a Civil Engineer. However, he soon realized that writing was his true calling. As a result, he took a leap and never looked back. Netflix's upcoming Philip K. Dick will potentially be so dark that it might make Blade Runner look optimistic. Although Philip K. Dick's works have received multiple big and small screen adaptations in the past, Blade Runner is perhaps the most popular take on his work. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is not exactly a direct book-to-screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? However, the movie and its overarching franchise does draw heavily from the cyberpunk Philip K. Dick book. It is interesting how, despite being hard to adapt, Philip K. Dick sci-fi stories are often picked up for screen adaptations. Some movies and shows, like The Man in the High Castle, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, have even succeeded at doing justice to the author's ideas. For the first time, Netflix is adapting a Philip K. Dick story. The story in question, The World Jones Made, never became as mainstream or popular as Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Still, it has a compelling premise and seems like a great choice for a modern TV adaptation. Netflix’s Dystopian Philip K. Dick Adaptation Can Be Even Darker Than Blade Runner The Blade Runner franchise gets increasingly bleak when it dabbles with ideas surrounding the slow erosion of human empathy. Even its portrayal of its cyberpunk world where corporations wield unimaginable power over human lives and replicants is incredibly grim. However, Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made operates on an even darker macro-political scale. In the Philip K. Dick story, the overarching post-war world is so broken that it is on the brink of collapse. This is when the government imposes the philosophy of "Relativism" on its people, which forces them to accept that no objective truth exists and all beliefs and opinions are valid. It comes off as a scary post-dystopian setting, reminding one of post-apocalyptic shows like Silo. While the characters in Blade Runner have some semblance of free will while fighting for their agency and time, the titular lead in The World Jones Made is always running out of time and realizes he has no free will. He acquires the ability to see the future, but that only proves to him that everything is predetermined. Like most Philip K. Dick shows and movies, even Netflix's upcoming adaptation, titled The Future Is Ours, is getting rid of some of the more bizarre aspects of the original story. However, as its plot details suggest, it will stay true to the darker political aspects of its source material. Netflix’s The Future Is Ours Can Be Its Answer To Prime Video’s Blade Runner 2099 Many Philip K. Dick adaptations and book-to-screen sci-fi translations struggle to leave their mark because they oversimplify their source material's story. Netflix's The Future is Ours risks doing the same. Even Prime Video's Blade Runner 2099 could make the same mistake by diluting the philosophical elements that made its predecessors so widely loved. However, if both shows succeed at honoring their source text while also etching their own distinct identities in the sci-fi genre, they could become perfect rivals. Philip K. Dick's The World Jones Made barely has any cyberpunk elements. Owing to this, from a narrative standpoint, it will be significantly different from Blade Runner 2099. Still, both projects are incredible leaps in the sci-fi genre for both Prime Video and Netflix. Both The Future Is Ours and Blade Runner could eventually pave the way for the two streamers to eventually pick up more Philip K. Dick stories for small-screen adaptations. Blade Runner The Blade Runner franchise is a cyberpunk science fiction series originating from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. The franchise began with the 1982 film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, which, although initially underappreciated, has since become a seminal work in science fiction cinema. The franchise explores complex themes of humanity, identity, and artificial intelligence, set in a dystopian future where bioengineered beings known as replicants are hunted by special agents called Blade Runners. The franchise has expanded to include a sequel film, several short films, an anime series, upcoming TV series, video games, and comics, all of which continue to explore the rich and complex world of Blade Runner.