Crazy Taxi Is Becoming a Movie. Of Course It Is.

Some video games are crying out to become movies.

The Last of Us had characters, emotion, tragedy and a fully formed world. Fallout had decades of mythology. Tomb Raider had Lara Croft. Crazy Taxi had a yellow cab, a countdown clock and the opportunity to drive through a shopping centre at 70mph while The Offspring shouted at you. Naturally, Netflix is turning it into a movie.

Netflix and SEGA have officially announced a live-action Crazy Taxi film as the first project in a new partnership that will also include a new Sonic the Hedgehog animated series and a live-action adaptation of Stranger Than Heaven. The Crazy Taxi movie will be written by Dan Gregor and Doug Mand, the team behind the 2025 Naked Gun reboot, while Neal H. Moritz, Toby Ascher and Toru Nakahara, who have helped turn Sonic into one of cinema’s more successful game franchises, are producing. Which all sounds very sensible. Until you remember what Crazy Taxi actually is...

The original arcade game arrived in 1999 before becoming one of the Dreamcast’s most memorable titles. You played a taxi driver, collected increasingly impatient passengers and then drove them to their destination as quickly and irresponsibly as humanly possible. Traffic laws were largely treated as optional. Pavements were fair game. Ramps were encouraged. San Francisco-inspired streets became playgrounds for enormous jumps, near misses and spectacularly poor decisions. And that was basically it.

There was no murdered father to avenge. No ancient prophecy. No complicated multiverse. Pick someone up. Drive like an idiot. Get paid. Repeat. So what exactly is the film going to be about? That, strangely, might be why this could work.

Trying to turn Crazy Taxi into a serious action movie would be completely missing the point. Netflix and SEGA appear to understand that, describing the project as a live-action comedy designed to capture the game’s chaotic energy. SEGA producer Toru Nakahara has promised something “hilariously crazy”, while the producers have specifically referenced the experience of driving a yellow cab on the Dreamcast with loud music playing and smashing through everything in sight.

Give us a driver who desperately needs money. Give them one ridiculous night. Put an increasingly bizarre collection of passengers in the back seat. Then create some flimsy reason why every journey has to be completed at ludicrous speed.

The bigger story here is how dramatically Hollywood’s relationship with video games has changed. Twenty years ago, announcing a movie based on a game usually generated a mixture of dread and low expectations. Now The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Sonic, Fallout, The Last of Us and others have turned gaming into one of Hollywood’s most valuable hunting grounds for stories and audiences.

Netflix’s own pipeline now includes adaptations of Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War, Minecraft, Clash of Clans and more.

So yes, Crazy Taxi is becoming a movie. Do we need one? Absolutely not.

Do we want to see a yellow cab fly through a fruit market while punk music plays and someone screams from the back seat?

Actually, yes. Quite badly.

Just please don’t spend 40 minutes explaining the driver’s childhood. Start the meter. Hit the accelerator. And whatever you do, don’t use the brakes.