While there were a handful of successful video game adaptations before this year, 2026 might be the inflection point when Hollywood decides to go all in on the trend. This year alone, we’ve already had The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Return to Silent Hill, Iron Lung, and Mortal Kombat 2, and Resident Evil and Street Fighter are still on the horizon. Six movies in one year might not sound like a lot, but that’s almost half the number of video game movies released in the first five years of the decade.
The early 2000s and 2010s are littered with failed video game adaptations, so living in an age of Fallout and Arcane feels like a major step up. But how likely is it that these studios truly respect the material, and aren’t just treating the video game medium as a resource to be extracted? The recent announcement of an adaptation for a game that hasn’t even been released yet might reveal what the filmmaking industry really thinks of gaming.
Netflix has had plenty of success in the gaming world, but this is the first time it’s working on an adaptation of an unreleased game.
Netflix
On September 14, Deadline announced that Netflix is planning a new slate of projects in partnership with Sega. So far, these projects include a new Sonic the Hedgehog series, a film adaptation of Crazy Taxi, and most curiously, a film adaptation of Stranger Than Heaven, an upcoming action-adventure release developed by RGG Studio and not set for a release until January 2027.
A prequel to the Yakuza/Like a Dragon franchise, Stranger Than Heaven was announced at the 2024 Game Awards as Project Century, and officially revealed in June 2025. While it’s a highly anticipated game, announcing a live-action adaptation before it’s even out feels rash. The involvement of Sega’s Senior Executive Officer, Toru Nakahara, is certainly a good sign, but there’s still concern that companies like Netflix don’t see video games as art unto themselves, only as a key to a preconstructed fanbase willing to watch an adaptation. As video game adaptations become increasingly prevalent, especially adaptations of recent (or unreleased) games, it’s hard not to fear a world in which films or television shows are seen as the “true” way to experience a story tailor-made for video games.
Stranger Than Heaven’s connection to the Yakuza games means it already has a sizeable built-in fanbase.
Sega
On the flip side, the Crazy Taxi announcement raises the question of why Netflix feels the need to adapt such a gameplay-forward series at all. There’s no groundbreaking story or idiosyncratic characters; the entire experience is based on the simple gameplay loop of picking up passengers and dropping them off. This isn’t to say that the Crazy Taxi movie will be bad (and coming from Dan Gregor, the screenwriter of Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, there’s a chance it could be more clever than it initially seems), but it does raise the question of why it’s even being called Crazy Taxi, beyond the sake of name recognition, if it requires creating a plot and characters from scratch?
Video game movies carry a lot more weight and financial promise than they did 20 years ago, which means that studios will push the trend even harder now that it’s successful. But hopefully that doesn’t mean a world where games start to be seen as a “trial run” for a movie adaptation, which has been happening with literature for a while now. It’s too early to assume these Netflix/Sega projects will be bad, but the history of Hollywood is filled with people jumping on a trend and learning all the wrong lessons from it.
Credit: Source link