Netflix-Sega Slate: Crazy Taxi Film, Sonic Kids Series — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Netflix and Sega announced a new slate partnership covering a Crazy Taxi film, a Sonic children's animated series, and a Stranger Than Heaven live-action feature, building on their prior collaboration Sonic Prime (three seasons).
- Dan Gregor & Doug Mand, the screenwriting duo behind 2025's The Naked Gun reboot, are penning the Crazy Taxi film, with Neal H. Moritz & Toby Ascher (Original Film) and Toru Nakahara producing.
- Crazy Taxi first hit arcades in 1999 as a punk-rock cabbie racer through chaotic city streets, and the franchise's next installment, Crazy Taxi: World Tour, releases next year.
- The Sonic animated series, in development with Carlos Stevens and Nakahara, targets an upper pre-school audience with what Netflix calls 'high-voltage, comedic, yet emotionally grounded' storytelling with attitude and 'that's my crew' wish fulfillment.
- Stranger Than Heaven comes from RGG Studio (developers of the Like a Dragon/Yakuza series) and follows a foreigner in early 20th-century Japan rising from destitute stranger to feared yakuza to entertainment tycoon, with Nakahara producing the live-action take.
- Sega's trio joins Netflix's existing video-game-adaptation pipeline, which already includes a live-action Assassin's Creed series, a live-action Gears of War film, animated Minecraft/Magic: The Gathering/Clash of Clans series, competition series Overcooked, and second seasons of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Splinter Cell: Deathwatch plus Devil May Cry's third and final season.
Why it matters: The deal gives Netflix three Sega titles spanning radically different eras and tones—a 1999 arcade racer, a Yakuza-developed period drama, and a preschool Sonic show—while expanding Sega's reach into film and children's animation, joining a Netflix video-game-adaptation pipeline that already spans Assassin's Creed, Gears of War, and Devil May Cry.
Ask SkimNews
