Netflix Gets Into Steampunk and Time Travel with New Film and Series

Netflix is expanding its sci-fi series roster to include a time travel thriller film and an adaptation of Richard Morgan’s popular steampunk novel Altered Carbon.

The Flash’s Robbie Amell and Jessica Jones’ Rachael Taylor are both expected to star in the upcoming post-apocalyptic tale ARQ, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The series finds its leads trapped in a time loop as masked raiders attempt to break their way into the characters’ fortified home.

Amell will star as an engineer who has discovered and now must protect a renewable energy technology that could save a future where the oil supply has run dry and wars have broken out around the world. It’s that very same technology that triggers the nightmarish time loop Amell’s character is trapped in. Taylor’s roll has yet to be named. Tony Elliot, a writer and story editor for Orphan Black, will serve as the film’s writer and director.

Meanwhile, fans of Richard Morgan’s steampunk, body transference tale have been granted a 10-episode order from Netflix. Based 500 years in the future, humans have cheated death by learning how to store conscious memory. Near the point of death, they transfer that “soul” from the old body to a new one. The process is formally known as “resleeving.”

When a wealthy and recently resleeved man believes he was murdered, but has no memory backed up from the last 48 hours, ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs sets out to uncover the truth. Kovacs will face a number of hurdles, one of which is that authorities are convinced Kovacs’ client committed suicide.

Altered Carbon is produced by Skydance Studios and will be written be Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island, Terminator Genisys) according to Deadline.