Sonic the Hedgehog 4 movie wraps up filming with a Metal Sonic reveal

I still can’t believe that we live in a reality with **three** live action *Sonic the Hedgehog* movies that are heads and tails (ha!) above those two shitty CGI *Mario* pictures.

Bullying the studio into changing Sonic’s design has created the all time best outcome for these movies

Why did I read this as “Metal Amy”?

Sonic the Edgehog

The funniest thing about these movies is that the original cursed Sonic design somehow became the franchise’s origin story.

Like the internet bullied one trailer so hard that we accidentally unlocked a surprisingly solid Sonic cinematic universe.

Now we’re four movies in, Metal Sonic is showing up, Jim Carrey keeps coming back, and somehow this is one of the more stable video game movie franchises. Wild timeline.

They revealed metal sonic at the end of the last movie in a post credits teaser.

Not so much a reveal when it was already shown at the end of Sonic 3 (ackshually)

My wife has come to enjoy gaming thanks to me, but she’s very much a Nintendo/Cute Accessible Platformer type of gamer. She’ll play each new Kirby, Yoshi, Pokemon, or Luigi’s Mansion game. She loved Astro Bot. But there’s realistically been no way for her to connect to Sonic the Hedgehog. The old 2D games are too punishing, and the new 3D ones are too janky.

(Yes, *Mania* is great. It’s still a wildly different style of platformer than any Mario game.)

But after years of being told by people that these movies are actually good (and me writing those claims off as Sonic Fans Being Sonic Fans), we watched the first movie a couple of months ago.

Within the following 4 weeks, we watched all 3 movies and the entire 6-episode *Knuckles* miniseries. And my wife is a genuine Sonic fan. She fucking LOVES these characters. And through that, she understands why I do, too. She understands my obsession with Knuckles purely due to Idris Elba’s portrayal of him.

And that’s the crazy part, right? The Sonic Cinematic Universe pulls heavily from the full history of the games, shows, comics, and more. But it never does a straight adaptation. The characters aren’t a 1:1 match to any version of them elsewhere. But their core traits are there, and they’re done in such a heartfelt, effective manner. Sonic is both nothing like the character from SA2 and also feels natural making many of the same choices he does in the game.

And this is even crazier for me because **I was a die-hard Nintendo fanboy growing up during the 90s Console Wars.** If anyone was designed to love the Illumination Mario films deeply and without question, it would be me. Instead, I found the first one pleasant-yet-forgettable, and the second one actively insulting to its audience’s intelligence and love for the characters. It felt like a Michael Bay movie for babies, which is an insult to both Bay and Babies.

But the Sonic movies work *because of the human characters*. Never in a million years would I have predicted that shit, yet here we are.

Framing Sonic as a **lonely orphaned alien teenager who desperately wants to connect with a world he was trained to fear** is both brilliant and obvious. It’s ET. It’s Lilo and Stitch. Kids can see themselves as Sonic, and adults can relate to the Wachowskis, who are basically held up as the Coolest Millennial Couple Ever. By the third movie, they have adopted three different alien animals and are genuinely invested in ensuring they grow up in an emotionally safe environment.

Everything Sonic does and learns in these movies is framed by his relationship to his adopted parents, and the lessons he learns (or incorrectly interprets) from Tom. He spent his life admiring humans from a distance in a way Tails and Knuckles didn’t, which explains their different personalities and perspectives. Tails spent his time more or less monitoring/idolizing Sonic, and Knuckles rigidly holds onto his Warrior’s Code as a way to define himself and as the only way he knows how to carry on as the last survivor of his dead culture.

I won’t even get into how well they handle Shadow as a clear Mirror Universe version of Sonic who had the loving family stripped away and replaced by an abusive, manipulative guardian who couldn’t care less about his emotional well-being. Or how Robotnik is both a completely batshit and unique take on the character who matches the tone of Sonic and his world in these films and becomes **more like his videogame counterpart** in each subsequent appearance. Or Agent Stone, full stop.

I cannot believe how good these stupid video game talking animal movies are. And I think people slept on *Knuckles*; it’s basically retelling the first movie’s story, but in reverse. If you like Adam Pally or The Lonely Island (I won’t spoil it, but **the show basically does the “Herald of Darkness” scene from** ***Alan Wake 2*** **SEVERAL MONTHS BEFORE AW2 came out**) and you accept that it’s a very goofy comedy side story, you’ll have a great time.

I didn’t even know there was a third.