Netflix and Sega Team Up for a Crazy Taxi Movie, a Stranger Than Heaven Crime Drama, and a New Sonic Series
Sega and Netflix have announced one of the more unusual multi-title deals in recent memory, and it stretches across three completely different eras of Sega’s catalog. Confirmed on September 14, the partnership pairs a live-action Crazy Taxi comedy movie and a live-action Stranger Than Heaven crime drama film with a brand new animated Sonic the Hedgehog series aimed at a much younger audience than the games ever were.
Three Games, Three Very Different Genres
Instead of leaning on one style of adaptation, Sega and Netflix are spreading this deal across formats that have almost nothing in common with each other.
- Crazy Taxi: a live-action comedy movie based on the 1999 arcade racer
- Stranger Than Heaven: a live-action crime drama film based on an unreleased RGG Studio game
- Sonic the Hedgehog: a new animated series aimed at preschool age viewers, unconnected to the already concluded Sonic Prime
Crazy Taxi Is Becoming a Comedy From The Naked Gun’s Writers
The Crazy Taxi movie has Dan Gregor and Doug Mand writing the script, the same duo behind 2025’s well received Naked Gun reboot. Neal H. Moritz and Toby Ascher of Original Film are producing alongside Sega’s Toru Nakahara, the same trio that also produced the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog films. The original Crazy Taxi launched in arcades back in 1999 and built its identity around reckless driving set to a loud soundtrack, and Sega is carrying that same chaos into a new game, Crazy Taxi: World Tour, due out in 2027. Nakahara described the tone Sega is chasing for the movie as “hilariously crazy.”
Stranger Than Heaven Turns an Unreleased Game Into a Crime Drama
The second film is based on Stranger Than Heaven, a loose Like a Dragon prequel from RGG Studio that spans decades of Japanese history and follows Japanese American protagonist Makoto Daito rising through the yakuza ranks to eventually found the Tojo Clan. The game itself does not launch until January 15, 2027, which makes this one of the rarer cases of a movie being set up before its source material has even shipped. Nakahara is producing this project too, and Sega has been clear that the story is meant as a spiritual take on the Like a Dragon world rather than a strict retelling of established series canon.
Stranger Than Heaven, the RGG Studio game behind the new crime drama film, launches January 15, 2027
A New Sonic Series Aims At a Much Younger Audience
The third piece of the deal is a new animated Sonic the Hedgehog series developed by Carlos Stevens and Toru Nakahara, aimed at preschool and early elementary viewers rather than the older audience the games and films typically draw. It has no connection to Sonic Prime, the previous Netflix Sonic series, which already wrapped its run, so this is being built as its own separate entry point into the franchise for the youngest fans.
Why Netflix and Sega Are Betting on This
Netflix’s VP of Nonfiction and Transmedia Brandon Riegg framed the deal around built in appeal, saying “great games already have what every adaptation is chasing.” Sega president and COO Shuji Utsumi echoed that sentiment, framing the goal as honoring what makes each game special rather than treating the three franchises as interchangeable intellectual property. None of the three projects have release dates yet, and neither film has a director or any cast attached, but the spread on display, a slapstick comedy, a period set crime drama, and a preschool cartoon, shows Sega is willing to let very different games go in very different directions once they leave the screen they were built for.
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