Why James Marsden joining the Sonic the Hedgehog movie kind of makes me cringe

The characters of Sonic Boom accurately depicting Sonic Team in a bind. Screenshot via Nintendo/YouTube.

The uh-oh

Now, this is the stuff that makes us worry a lot. We said we’d talk about what happened to the Sonic franchise, and the “uh-oh” category is the right place for it. Once we got to Sonic Adventure 2 in the early 2000s, most Sonic games started getting a little sloppy, to say the least. Games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Unleashed and especially Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric became laughable for their overall poor gameplay.

Eurogamer described Rise of Lyric as such:

"…Another blind fumbling attempt to reassemble decaying parts in a different order to see if life will return to the carcass."

That’s not the kind of review that makes you hopeful for a movie.

And not to forget, video game movies don’t have a great history to begin with. The 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie became a love-to-hate cult classic at best. Even something like Angelina Jolie’s Laura Croft: Tomb Raider had a hard time clicking with fans (look at that ghastly 20 percent Rotten Tomatoes score). That just goes to show that sticking a popular actor into a movie won’t necessarily make it better.

So after all that, what hope does this Sonic the Hedgehog movie have? Some, but not much. Video games movies have never seemed to hit that sweet spot that makes it just as good as the original games. Plus, we just got a movie about a madman collecting shiny gems to control the universe. There’s no way Thanos can compare to Dr. Eggman at this rate.

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At best, it’ll be a fun adventure movie that taps into the nostalgia of Sonic and Sega’s past. At it’s worst, this will probably be the final nail in the coffin for the Sonic franchise — at least for some time. We’ll find out what’ll become of this movie when it hits theaters November 2019.