In new interviews with Paramount executives and producers, we are finally getting details on what this new live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie will be about and it sounds rather cringeworthy.
The first interview with James Gianopulos in Deadline has him talk about the overall premise for Sonic as a character in this new movie and that the beloved blue hedgehog will be a “delinquent”.
He’s a juvenile delinquent on the adventures in a pretty straight rural environment with a local policeman. It was instantly engaging and it was good enough where you could see where it’s going.
This is a very obvious and pretty massive deviation from the character in the games and it’s clear that they don’t understand this property at all.
Following that, the second interview with Neal Moritz at The Wrap fleshes out this new movie’s premise even further.
What we’re trying to do with Sonic is make a movie about a small-town police officer and Sonic at a time when they are both desperately in need of a friend, and we hope that this theme is friendship is what gives the film its heart and makes it prosper.
So not only is Sonic a juvenile delinquent but this will also be a buddy cop movie, which is a surreal kind of wrong.
Considering how badly Paramount messed up its Ghost in the Shell live-action movie adaptation, you would have thought that the company would have hired people who actually understand Japanese intellectual properties by now. Clearly, that is not the case here.
Instead, Sonic will be wrongly cast as a delinquent in a buddy cop movie. So as someone that has played the Sonic The Hedgehog games for years, I really don’t understand what Paramount is trying to do here, apart from alienating the entire fanbase it needs to engage with.
This live-action Sonic The Hedgehog movie will be released next year in theaters on November 15.
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