Sonic the Hedgehog, it seems, has turned into one of the rare video game movie successes. Video game movies generally aren’t anything worth writing home about, and after the first trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog dropped – complete with a creepy, almost human-like Sonic – it seemed that this movie wouldn’t be either. Following a period of some intensely negative feedback, Paramount delayed the movie as the designers went back to the drawing board to change Sonic’s design to something a little more familiar.
It seemed to work, too. Sonic’s new design was given a warm reception from fans and the movie went on to be a box office success. While it only received mixed critic reviews (the game holds a 47 critic score on Metacritic), fans were far kinder in their analysis of the movie, and the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Paramount to release the movie digitally far ahead of its original schedule.
In the end, everything worked out for Sonic the Hedgehog, even though it was close to being another quickly forgotten movie based on a video game property. That’s why it wasn’t surprising when Paramount confirmed back in May that a sequel is in the works. Fast forward today and we’ve got a release date for the film, as revealed by Sonic the Hedgehog actor Ben Schwartz on Twitter.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2, for lack of an official title, will be out on April 8th, 2022. That’s still a very long way out, and it’s strange that we already have a release date for the new movie, but then again, these are unprecedented times we find ourselves in.
Obviously, given the pandemic, shooting for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 could well be delayed at some point in the future, but for now, we’ll count on seeing the sequel in 2022. There aren’t very many details about the sequel thus far, but we’ll hopefully hear more over the course of the next year.
