Paramount's Sonic the Hedgehog movie finally released last week and has raced to a terrific start at the box office, according to a report from Deadline (via The Gamer). The movie, starring SEGA's iconic blue hedgehog alongside Jim Carrey as Dr Robotnik, has broken opening-weekend box office opening records across the United States and Canada for a video game movie adaptation.
While it had a relatively slow start when it opened on Thursday, the weekend saw a surge in numbers, hitting a three-day total of $57 million yesterday. While that is a record for a video game movie in the US and Canada, globally it's not done quite as well, sitting at the $100 million mark - that's lower than both the Detective Pikachu and Warcraft movies, which brought in $157.3 and $119.1 million on their opening weekends, respectively.
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This comes despite a number of initially negative reviews from the likes of The Independent, The Guardian, Eurogamer and Variety, as reported in our review roundup of the movie on Thursday, following its initial release. There were a couple of more positive reviews amongst our findings though, and it seems that these were the norm, rather than the exception as it first appeared. (It's worth noting that our reviewer wasn't moved by the movie much, either.)
The release of the first Sonic movie trailer, back in April 2019, certainly didn't receive a positive reaction with fans complaining furiously about Sonic's overall appearance, but especially his teeth - I mean seriously, what were they thinking? The lovable blue hedgehog was redesigned following the backlash and we were soon presented with a much more reasonable interpretation of the spiky hero.
But it seems that the early criticism of Sonic's design hasn't put off Jim Carrey, who stated in an interview last month that he's keen to return as Dr Robotnik in any sequels that might emerge. "It was so much fun, first of all, and a real challenge to try to convince people that I have a triple-digit IQ... There is so much room, you know, Robotnik has not reached his apotheosis."
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In other video game movie-related news, we learned last week that the sequel to the 2018 Tomb Raider movie, unoriginally titled Tomb Raider 2, will incorporate the stories from both the Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider games. Filming is scheduled to start in a few months and a provisional release date of 21 March 2020 has been set.
Featured Image Credit: Paramount PicturesTopics: Sega, Sonic The Hedgehog