Yes, Paramount Is Really Desperate Enough To Tackle That Live Action Sonic the Hedgehog Movie

Man oh man, what a rough year it has been for Paramount Pictures. The last nine months have been plagued with bomb after bomb for them, from Ghost in the Shell in March, Baywatch in May, and mother! in September. Hell, even their “sure thing” for the year, Transformers: The Last Knight, underperformed big time, barely making $100 million domestically and tapping out at a paltry (for the franchise, at least) $650 million worldwide. And that’s their most “successful” movie of the year too!

Yes, Paramount is having a rough time of it lately, and like many other studios in Hollywood, are searching desperately for a big franchise to provide salvation for them. And in their desperation for a profitable IP, Paramount has turned to a property they don’t completely understand. Some studios aren’t looking for a franchise that is logical for a movie adaptation. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some studios…just want to see some money coming in.

So they turn to silly things like a live action Sonic the Hedgehog to try and make that happen.

Yes, the idea of a live action Sonic the Hedgehog movie has been bouncing around Hollywood for a few years now, first brought to the table in a serious way by Deadpool director Tim Miller. Miller enlisted the talents of his Blur Studios collaborator Jeff Fowler to direct the project, with Miller producing alongside Neal Moritz and his Original Film banner. You know, the production company behind such original films as Fast and the Furious 9, 22 Jump Street, and Goosebumps.

Anyways, the project first gained life over at Sony Pictures, a.k.a. the place you would expect such a desperate franchise bid to go. But with Sony’s fortune somewhat rising with the success of Spider-Man: Homecoming and Baby Driver, I guess the project now goes to the new underwhelming kid on the block: Paramount, who will try to make the live-action/CGI hybrid work.

So what exactly will the story be for this Sonic the Hedgehog movie? Ha, like anyone has thought that far ahead. Sure, the film has been written by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller (who wrote the National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze movies — yes, the original AND the sequel!), but I can’t imagine that it has anything even vaguely resembling a compelling plot. I mean the fucking game is about a fast hedgehog who runs through rings and fights a scientist shaped like an egg. There is NOTHING about the game that leads itself to a live action feature film, which probably means we’ll get something akin to the good ol’ “character from another world lands in ours, makes friends with some precocious kid, and goes through wacky fish-out-of-water hijinks” straight from the live-action/CGI hybrid template.

Which I guess makes Paramount’s acquiring of the film a little less nonsensical: the house that gave us Transformers will probably be very eager to get another one of those. Why not just get Michael Bay to direct it too? Lord knows the world has been waiting with baited breath for sexy upskirt shots of a barely legal Tails the Fox.