Cyberpunk: Edgerunners almost gave David a fate worse than death

With Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Season 2 set to be properly revealed on June 29, series writer Bartosz Sztybor has pulled back the curtain on how much darker Season 1's ending could have been. In a preview excerpt from an upcoming Anime Corner interview, Sztybor confirmed that a happy ending was never on the table — but some of the discarded finales were bleaker than what fans actually saw.

In the final cut, protagonist David Martinez is killed by Adam Smasher while his girlfriend Lucy escapes to the moon, fulfilling the dream she'd chased throughout the series. It's gutting, but David at least dies for something he chose. One scrapped ending would have denied him even that: "There was never a happy ending. There were even worse endings," Sztybor said. "There was one ending in which David doesn't die entirely. Arasaka gets him and he ends up fighting in Africa or South America in corporate wars as a robot." Sztybor also hinted that this wasn't the only darker version in development — the word "endings" (plural) suggests multiple alternatives were discussed before the team landed on the version that aired.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners launched on Netflix in 2022 as a collaboration between Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red, set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077. The show became one of the most talked-about anime releases of that year, and its ending — scored by Rosa Walton's I Really Want to Stay at Your House — landed hard enough that it sent players back to the base game in droves. The scrapped Corporate Wars ending would have been a crueler inversion of the show's core theme: David spends every episode fighting to escape the corporate machine, and that alternate fate would have seen him consumed by it entirely, stripped of agency and turned into a weapon for the very system he resisted.

Season 2 will follow a new cast of characters in Night City — a glimpse of at least one new character, apparently a Media, surfaced at the Annecy Animation Festival this week. No release date has been announced, but the June 29 reveal should fill in some of those blanks. A prequel manga starring Rebecca also dropped back in February for fans still living in Season 1's world.