Netflix Wins Sesame Street Movie Rights, Ending a 14-Year Development Saga

Netflix has won the feature film rights to Sesame Street, ending a year-long bidding contest and bringing the beloved children’s franchise fully under the streamer’s umbrella — 14 years after a movie was first put into development.

Rideback, the production company behind the billion-dollar live-action Lilo & Stitch and Aladdin films and run by Jonathan Eirich and Michael Lofaso, will produce the feature. Sesame Workshop will be involved in a producer capacity. Netflix had no comment.

The bidding war began as a three-way contest involving Universal, Warner Bros., and Netflix. Warner Bros. bowed out early, having previously held the film rights but failed to move a project into production. Universal’s bid included Everything Everywhere All at Once filmmakers the Daniels attached as producers. Rideback’s existing relationship with Sesame Workshop — the two had already been collaborating on an animated project — gave it an early foothold that proved decisive. Sesame Workshop favored the creative approach Rideback brought to Netflix.

The deal consolidates the Sesame Street brand under Netflix, which already picked up television rights to the series in May 2025. That acquisition had itself come after Warner Bros. Discovery declined to renew its own deal with the show.

The previous Warner Bros. version of the project had Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel attached to direct, with Anne Hathaway and Chance the Rapper starring and Bo Burnham writing original songs. Krisel is no longer involved, and Hathaway is potentially out as well. Netflix is wiping the slate clean of previous development and attached talent, restarting the project from scratch.

The film’s development history stretches back to 2012, when it was first announced at 20th Century Fox before moving to Warner Bros. in 2015. The story developed there followed the Sesame Street characters after being mysteriously expelled from their neighborhood, forced to collaborate with a history show host to prove Sesame Street actually exists. A 2021 theatrical release was announced, then pushed back multiple times as the pandemic ground production to a halt, and the project quietly stalled with no public updates since.

The film would be the third live-action Sesame Street feature, following Follow That Bird in 1985 and The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland in 1999. No director is currently attached to the Netflix version.