Sonic the Hedgehog Cinematic Universe Thread (& Knuckles)

I made the "mistake" of seeing the third movie in theaters before seeing the second, putting that in air quotes because I know the second movie is just a loose adaptation of Sonic 3 & Knuckles and the third movie is just a loose adaptation of Sonic Adventure 2. The numbers sure do make it confusing, but oh well.

My Blu-Ray of the second movie and the Knuckles miniseries just arrived in the mail last week. I finally watched 2, and holy halibut did I enjoy it! I would have seen it sooner, but I wanted to take my nephews (ages 5 and 3) to the theater and watch it with them. At least I got to take them to the third movie!

The third movie might be the pinnacle just because Shadow's character balances out the tone really well, but Jim Carrey and Idris Elba elevated this movie to another level. I wasn't too thrilled about Tails meeting Sonic for the first time instead of having the two of them go way back at first, but it had to be done to keep the story focused and give Tails a chance to grow as a character instead of showing up fully-developed. I wish they could have worked the death egg into the story, but the design of the giant robot was a nice nod to it.

All in all, I enjoy the humor of these movies. Idris Elba and Jim Carrey stole the spotlight in all their scenes, especially the fish out of water humor with Knuckles.

... These movies are making me curious about what a latte really tastes like with steamed Austrian goat milk.

 

Sonic and Shadow go Super at the end

 

No fricking way dude.

 

The good guys save the world again at the end

 

My biggest takeaway from this film was that movie shadow is adorable and i want to give him a kiss on the forehead

 

There is at least one scene in which Sonic runs.

 

Someone gets friendzoned.

 

The part where Sonic killed Eggman then had to live with that regret took it too far imo

 

Sonic 3 was a psyop intended on causing political instability on Sonic Retro. Says so in the credits.

 

With time travel back on the menu for Sonic 4, I wonder if the ancients from Sonic Frontiers will make an appearance in some shape or form. Would make for a great excuse to have Super Sonic use his hype move from the Giganto boss fight (the one with the holograms) to smash a horde of Metal Sonics!

 

The less we hear about the ancients the better

 

@qwertysonic You're probably right, I just wanted an excuse to incorporate Frontiers' boss fights. Lol

You have to admit, the Super Sonic holograms would be a cool way to deal with an army of Metal Sonics.

 

Not sure if this was already mentioned, but apparently one concept artist's work for Sonic 3 is suspected of using generative AI, as noted on Twitter. Apparently the Knuckles show might've had a similar situation?
https://x.com/SEGAInforment/status/1885284478400004196

 

Oh that sucks, especially since it's the sincerity of these movies that I appreciate the most and this goes against the entire spirit of it.

 

I finally wound up seeing the two sequels a couple days ago, and I was not happy about how the 3rd movie handled SA2's original story. The only thing they really kept (mostly) intact was the Maria/Shadow storyline, and even then that got massively modified. The way Gerald was handled grated on me as well, especially with how they just blipped him out near the end (I was hoping he'd still wind up getting ventilated like he did in-game).

But I think the thing that really upset me the most is how they basically took the big 'Day X' FMV from the game and turned it into almost a throwaway joke at the end ("woopsie... we sliced away a good bit of lunar mass... sorry?").

It's almost like they knew they had to put it in there somewhere, but the changes they'd made prevented them from doing so where it made sense to, so they chucked it in wherever they could, just to have something to show in trailers. Not like they could really do the Last Story or Cannon's Core anyway considering they decided to strip the ARK down to just the cannon part that wouldn't even completely level a single city if it were to come down.

Just like with the games, I'm giving Sonic 4 a hard pass. Glad it only cost me time to see 'em.


Edit: The AI thing came up while I was composing my thoughts, but I wanted to wait a bit to think about it before this spicy take: I kinda don't care if they happened to use AI to generate concept art; rough ideas getting iterated upon quickly. That's what AI assistance is for.

This whole "pick up a pencil" harassment campaign is funny as hell to see over something that wasn't even meant to be seen by the public. Now, if they'd used AI for production art, then there might be something to really gripe about.

 

I wonder if this is an age thing (I’m late 30s and my first games console was the Megadrive II with Sonics 1 and 2).

I had Sonic Adventure 2 Day 1 for the Gamecube first day release and it’s such an iconic bit of my childhood that I was happy with whatever nods were given within Sonic 3, the film.

Personally speaking I wasn’t expecting a 1:1 recreation of SA2 and I enjoyed virtually everything you’ve said you didn’t like in the film. Especially the lunar incident, which I laughed out loud at. I enjoyed it as a bit of light hearted humour.

S3 doesn’t feel to me like you should take it as a 1:1 recreation of the game and more a writer’s take on it for the modern era. It still had all of the basic storyline elements, including the Maria storyline, which I thought was handled really well - and actually, how Tom was used to mirror that and then get us to our final cutscenes at the eclipse cannon I really enjoyed.

The missing “ultimate weapon” monster was not the red line I thought it was going to be - on the contrary, simplifying the SA2 storyline made it feel more coherent to me, and the ethical standing of the major questions was really compelling.

I’m not saying you’re wrong, btw, you’re entitled to your views, but it surprises me that we have such widely conflicting views.

On a side note, do we all agree that Keanu Reeves as Shadow was the best new casting after Jim Carrey as Robotnik? Like - wow, chills. He was amazing.

 

Well, I'm older than that, having had it on the Dreamcast, and I loved SA2 precisely because it actually did a more mature and grounded story, and followed through on it. Not like how Forces tried to handle a 'darker' plot in the slightest. SA2 showed us there's plenty of room for the real and serious, even with colorful little furry critters.

Taking that scene out of its original position took the stakes off the table. The cannon goes from demonstrated, to simply a vague threat for Act III of the film.

If they wanted to do the Shadow/Maria story, they could easily have done so without trying to tie the rest of SA2 to it (easy enough to keep Gerald dead, after all). Not like they haven't done that plenty already.

Besides, they wasted plenty of runtime on stupid shit, most notably the dance scene that made me actually get up and do something else for a bit, waiting for it to just end. Of course, there's also plenty of the Dumb White Guy crap (hello, Wade) sprinkled throughout, which also pissed me right off, but that's something else. That shit needs to stop though, for real.

 

It just feels like a huge missed opportunity. I doubt we'll ever see another chance to tell the story of Sonic Adventure 2 on the big screen, because if they tried now SOMEONE would say "But we already did that", when they really, really didn't.
Anything of substance was left behind in favor of just doing whatever the writer and director thought was funny. By comparison to other Shadow-related efforts that were meant to create synergy with this released in the same year (Shadow Generations and Dark Beginnings), it's embarrassing that this is what hit the big screen, and that this is what people take away from Sonic as a whole from what claims to be inspired by one of its most ambitious stories.

Even if the mindset is that "Sa2 is a mess", the solution isn't to take everything that did work about it and its other adaptations, and its style and throw it out, it's to expand on the ideas that are there and supplement them with your own. And they didn't want to. And that SUCKS, it HURTS when they take something that meant something to you and erase most of it and then tell people that's what it always was.

idk, it just feels like Shadow is still a joke to people, and SA2 is becoming a joke between this and the stupid fucking real time fandub, and everything I love everyone else hates and wants to erase in favor of meaningless fluffy marketable references. Why live?

 

Damn