Sonic the Hedgehog Cinematic Universe Thread (& Knuckles)

This movie fuckin ruled, but I was wondering why there was no scene where Shadow looked directly at the camera and told me, personally, about the horrors of war and how by turning a blind eye to human suffering we are granting its perpetrators permission to continue their atrocities? I mean yeah, I know it’s a kids movie but come on, SEGA, I think we both know Gen Alpha can handle some heat.

 

I'm saying any of those films at their worst are better than any Sonic film at their best.

If screentime is an issue, I don't know what Shadow is supposed to have over Sandman, while yes Sandman is pushed the side, it's at least to further other narratives that are happening simultaneously, when Shadow himself is pushed to the side in favor of a second Jim Carrey and an extended set of scenes with two characters who only appear as an excuse to get two more actors a spot in the script and then disappear altogether with no plot of their own.

I don't feel like it's that specific what I would want out of Sonic 3, which is an actual adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2 that matches or even surpasses the ideas that are expressed in the source material, but what it does it does poorly or underutilized and it seems very ashamed of the source material despite using so much of its imagery, to the point it's kind of offensive key-jingling.

I'm not saying everything "for kids" that comes out has to have the darkest tones possible and we can never have anything lightheaded with low stakes and a joke every 30 seconds, but that can't be all there is, and besides the rare exception of something like Spider-Verse (both of which have the exact same age rating as Sonic) I can't think of anything that compares to some of what we got in the 2000s such as the Spider-Man trilogy or the Harry Potter movies (those first two in particular are what I think of) in the balance of "haha that's kinda funny" and "damn, that sucks but also that's pretty awesome", so of all games for a Sonic movie to claim to adapt why is it a problem to say that an adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2 should have nailed that balance better, in favor of "damn, that sucks but also that's pretty awesome" especially when the 6 year olds who saw Sonic 1 are now approaching 10 and old enough to understand something with dark humor and undertones of neglect and abuse like A series of unfortunate events.

All that just to add, the Sonic movies just aren't as well made as the Spider-Man ones for a variety of reasons, some I've laid out, some that are just obvious technical superiority, and that's why it's so frustrating to see them compared. Spider-Man made things to reference, Sonic made references to things.

See paragraph above the last run on sentence with an additional "you know what I meant"

The lack of any Hollywood project managing to successfully play with tones in """kids movies""" is what I'm talking about, there's clearly something that's missing from the equation. I'm saying Sonic should emotionally challenge what the Sonic audience is wanting to be challenged by, and of all the Sonic movies to experiment with that, why not the movie that's a successor to something already successful that has a built in audience of people who actually liked the original source material, but they kinda just blew it entirely.

 

The movie did that, you just missed it.

 

Talk about missing the point entirely lol

When sandman pushed to the side, it is as you said to let other narratives takes place, which he had absolute no relation to them, which is actually worse

*I will delve into some spoilers here from now on*

When Gerald take center stage in the 2nd Act, he is not another villain who appeared out of nowhere like what Spidey 3 loved to pull , his actions were present from the beginning, he is in fact the whole reason Shadow was released from his state in the first place

Not only that, Gerald is actually very relevant to Shadow, they share a history together, their entire motives comes from the same exact point -Maria's Death- , saying he doesn't have a plot of his own is weird in this context, the entire final act of the movie and his revenge plan comes from his story and motivation that he shares with Shadow, compares that to Spidey 3, separate villains, all operating on their own with no relation to each other, and no time to develop anyone, the one who got the most development is New Goblin, and that's due to his relation to spiderman and actually picking up plot-points from previous movies and building on them, making him the best out of the bunch, but also speaks of how it had to rely on things from previous movies cause it didn't really have time to build anything on it's own

That's exactly what the 3rd movie does tho? don't know how you come out of the movie without acknowledging that the movie did have dark undertones and more tragic things than previous movies, while also having some awesome moments , and also funny moments, the movie balanced them all, when i rewatched the movie yesterday, some random kid in the theater at the end was saying "damn everybody just died huh, only this person survived" ,kids grasped the themes of loss, death, betrayal, suicide, revenge, that the movie presented it to them just fine, failing to realize the movie had serious themes is ironic when i witnessed kids who grasped all of that and took it to heart

 

On top of that Spider-Man 3 actively disservices the first two films by retconning Uncle Ben's death and they make the first film's dynamic between Norman and Peter and Harry worse through the New Goblin storyline and Harry's redemption.

 

Sonic film franchise cracks a billion
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+ - Lone Silver fan still going ballistic in the comments section  

 

Genuine question, cause I really don't know what box office optics are: how impressive is this considering that each of the three films had a budget in the realm of ~$90M to $120M? Obviously they're performing well enough to get continued re-investment. But the Mario movie got $1.3B on a similar budget.

Is this just an example Mario being an outlier just because it's Mario? And Sonic's performance is still really strong, but making comparisons to Mario isn't really logical?

 

Yes

I'm driving. I can't give you a detail breakdown.

Not counting Pokémon (because it has a billion movies), only 2 franchises based on video games have crossed that mark. Mario and Resident Evil. Sonic now joins the club. Sonic movies also show growth with each entry. Most flop at the starting line or fizzled at the second entry.

I mentioned it in a post months ago when the billion comment was swirling. Out of all the films ever made, only about 50 of them hit a billion and most of them are part of larger franchises. It's not realistic to expect every film to make Mario money. Mario came from a proven studio and a beloved and still widely popular franchise.

 

Always forget about them retconning Uncle's Ben death due to how awful it is

Maybe they should have retconned Longclaw death and made it actually be done by Gerald's hand, somehow, or Shadow even though he was frozen for some inexplicable reason

 

Yeah, I think Mario is just the video game icon compared to other franchises. It's not that Sonic hasn’t had an impact, but it’s not as big as Mario’s.

Nintendo has also made a bigger effort to keep Mario’s presence active internationally, while Sega hasn’t done as much in that regard. And it paid off for the movie, which grossed approximately $785.9 million internationally (57.8% of its total earnings), while domestic revenue in the United States and Canada was about $574.9 million (42.2% of the total).

There was also morbid curiosity about whether it would be better than the original live-action Mario movie. Add to that the legacy of the series, the current success of the Switch and its games (like Odyssey and especially Mario Kart), the decision to go fully animated, and the partnership with Universal Parks, and they had the recipe for success.

I just think Sega needs to focus more on international markets. Back when Sonic X aired, it had great success worldwide, but Sega at that time didn’t take full advantage of it and kept the momentum going.

The Sonic movies, however, are doing a fantastic job on that front, and they’ve set the stage for Sega to leverage this renewed momentum.

To their credit, Sega seems to be putting in some effort now, but as someone who lived outside the U.S. and still keeps in touch with fans abroad, it feels like international markets are still getting crumbs compared to the attention given to the U.S., Japan, and the UK.

Big props to Paramount’s marketing and promo teams for catering to cultural differences in each region—it’s a key reason why the Sonic movies have resonated globally.

 

Yeah Nintendo and Universal spent years hyping up their first big Mario movie everywhere and how it was going to be a faithful adaption with Nintendo and Miyamoto's involvement.

Sonic started as freaking Hop 2. Now look at us.

 

Yes what's underreported is that Paramount picked up the rights to Sonic and saved it from getting scrapped by Sony, a very different situation when compared to the multi-pronged strategic partnership between Universal and Nintendo that made the Mario Bros Movie a big hit. It coming out post-pandemic from a proven money machine like Illumation didn't hurt either. If Sonic was a ground-up launch from Paramount ala the TMNT or Transformers, maybe a different story.

 

I don't think it would have been that different. Turtles and Transformers under Paramount didn't start off faithfully to their source material either.

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If anything, the recent underperformance of those franchises is what probably helped influence their decision to post pone the film for the redesign. If it was still under Sony, we'd probably still get Ugly Sonic.

 

Worse
We would get an actual Zavok origin movie

 

Sony Sonic 1 would have needed to make money first before we ever got a Sonic Villain Cinematic Universe. Otherwise, I'd have my Monster Hunter Fatalis movie already.

 

The modern movie landscape has people confused at what a “successful” movie looks like imo. Considering how it seemed like almost every Disney/Marvel movie was hitting a billion one after the other, seeing other franchise movies “only” take in like 500 million seems low. If Sonic 3 takes in over $400 million at its budget then Paramount will be very happy.

 

That and like Yash mentioned a while back, modern productions have ridiculously ballooned budgets that some movies have no choice but to be huge blockbusters. Dial of Destiny was always going to flop with its 380m+ budget. The Joker 2 could have been alright if the budget was just slightly above Joker's 55m. Joker 2's budget was $200m. The budget for Deadpool 1 was $58m. Deadpool 2 was $110m. Deadpool & Wolverine went up to $200m. Thank God people love those movies.

Paramount keeping the production budgets for these films about the same is a good move on their part.

 

The key difference to Sonic 3's "darkness" is that it's all superficial. Bad things happen but they're bad in the sense that they're saying "dying is bad", but you never actually have to confront the death, but since the movie tells you dying is bad I guess you're supposed to feel bad rather than there being any particular effort from the writers to make the death feel bad through presentation, which is more in line with Lost World than it is in SA2.

 

And what makes them superficial? actually what makes SA2 doing any better job at it if we being honest? Maria is like there for 2 seconds, we barely get to know her, she got shot, Shadow supposedly got sad, that's basically it, game doesn't really spend any meaningful amount of time establishing it's "darkness" or the meaning of death or any of that, while there is all sorts of stuff that i like about SA2 that didn't make it into the movie, the movie does superior job establishing the relation of Shadow and Maria ,their actual interactions and bonding, why she meant so much to him and why he is so angry for her loss, it's actually a prime example of "show don't tell" where the game was the opposite, they are close because they told us so.

What even the meaning of "movie tells you dying is bad"? no really, how you can even say it in straight face like that, it tells you death is bad because....characters were sad and experienced loss and all sorts of emotion? like what SA2 exactly does? or cause it plays sad music just like SA2 does?
To me those are just words without meaning, i truly don't get it