Taxi Driver almost had a sequel, but not in the form of a film – Here’s how

Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver didn’t just leave a mark on cinema. It carved out a whole epic legacy and continues to be one of his best projects to date. With Travis Bickle’s descent into madness and New York’s grimy underbelly as its backdrop, the film became a cult classic that still gets dissected in film schools and Reddit threads alike. So, naturally, the idea of a sequel has always floated around in whispers and what-ifs. But here’s the twist: it almost happened, not as a movie, but in a totally unexpected form.

Yep. Travis Bickle was about to return, not in a Scorsese-directed sequel, but as the playable lead in a gritty, early-2000s video game. In 2005, right in the middle of the open-world gaming boom, Taxi Driver was announced as a full-fledged sandbox-style video game. Players would’ve stepped directly into the grimy boots of Travis Bickle, navigating the underworld of 1970s New York City; this time not just narrating his spiral into madness, but living it.

Developed by Papaya Studio and published by Majesco, the game was envisioned as a direct continuation of the film’s ambiguous ending. The storyline picks up immediately after Betsy’s eerie final cab ride, with Travis diving headfirst into a violent revenge mission.

According to early development notes, the plot revolved around mobsters allegedly murdering Travis’s “failed romantic partner,” a convenient rewrite that ditched the film’s carefully crafted ambiguity in favor of blood, bullets, and bare-knuckle justice. In short, the game framed Travis not as a mentally unraveling insomniac with a savior complex, but as a full-blown vigilante anti-hero.

Why was the Taxi Driver video game canceled?

The idea did seem pretty promising, but not everyone was sold, especially Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader. Even though the rights to the film had been sold to Sony under the catch-all clause of “all media, known and unknown,” neither creator was willing to let Travis Bickle be reduced to a video game avatar for chaos. Several months into development, just as the team at Papaya was moving full steam ahead, Majesco received a call that changed everything.

Mark Caplan, head of licensing at Sony, reached out to Dan Kitchen and said that Scorsese had issued a very firm threat: if the game continued, he would make sure Sony never licensed another title in Hollywood again. Within moments, the project was canned, no warning, no press release, just gone. Papaya Studios later sued Majesco for breach of contract, but by then, the damage had been done, and the game had faded into forgotten gaming history.

Looking back, it’s not hard to understand why Scorsese fought so hard to stop it. Taxi Driver was never meant to glorify its protagonist- it’s a cautionary tale about isolation, radicalization, and the danger of projecting your own pain onto the world.

Turning that into a game sends the exact opposite message. Giving players the chance to walk in Travis Bickle’s shoes, gun in hand, only reinforces the worst and most common misreadings of the film- that Travis is a misunderstood hero rather than a deeply broken man.

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Still, the idea of a Taxi Driver sequel in any form continues to spark curiosity. But maybe it’s for the best that we never got to pick up the controller and drive Travis into another spiral. Some endings are meant to stay unanswered, quietly unsettling, and left alone in the rearview mirror.

Taxi Driver is available to stream on Prime Video and Netflix.

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