Blade Runner to The Matrix to Ghost in the Shell. The science-fiction sub-genre that combined corporate dystopia, digital technology, and neon-saturated visual design.
Cyberpunk is the science-fiction sub-genre that emerged from William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer and the broader 1980s literary movement. The form's visual conventions — neon-saturated nocturnal cityscapes, corporate dystopian futures, digital technology as both threat and tool, body modification, conscious AI — were largely established in cinema by Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), which predates Gibson's novel by two years.
Cyberpunk's predictions — corporate dominance of consumer technology, digital surveillance, the merging of body and machine, AI consciousness — have, by 2026, become recognisable features of contemporary life rather than science-fiction speculation. The form's visual conventions (neon, rain, mega-city sprawl) have aged into either retro-nostalgia or genuinely-functional contemporary urban realism, depending on which Asian or American city the viewer lives in.
The films that hold up are the ones whose cyberpunk imagery is in service of dramatic or philosophical material rather than just visual exoticism. Blade Runner survives because its question (what makes someone human) is still alive. The Matrix survives because its central conceit (the world as constructed simulation) remains philosophically loaded. The films that have aged less well are the ones that treated cyberpunk imagery as decorative.