Sonic the Hedgehog 2

The voice from the games, left off the poster

Colleen O'Shaughnessey has voiced Tails in the Sonic games since 2014, and she kept the role on screen. The theatrical release poster left her name out. Fan protest followed, and updated posters carried her name, and Tika Sumpter's, in the billing block.

The shoot ran under the working title Emerald Hill, the opening zone of the 1992 game: Vancouver from March to May 2021, then Hawaii until late June. Jeff Fowler returned to direct, and Sega's Marza Animation Planet handled the animation with Moving Picture Company. Idris Elba was announced as the voice of Knuckles in August 2021, after Jason Momoa had been considered.

The Story

Sonic lives with the Wachowskis and tries to be a vigilante hero, with little success. Tom and Maddie head to her sister Rachel's wedding in Hawaii and leave him the house for the weekend. That night Robotnik comes back from the mushroom planet he was banished to, with a new henchman: Knuckles, an echidna warrior who wants the location of the Master Emerald.

Three games from the nineties feed the script without any of them being adapted directly, and Fowler called the result "a melting pot" of ideas from several games in the series. Shadow the Hedgehog makes his first live action appearance here, a silent cameo meant to set up a larger role.

The Ideal Audience

A PG rating, and eight and up from Common Sense Media: a lot of fantasy violence, though characters hit by a car or nearly drowned come away stunned rather than hurt, and the guns the police carry turn out to be Tasers. Hawaii brings Mai Tais, sold at a resort drink stand, champagne flows at the wedding, and the swearing runs to "a-hole" and "we're screwed". Critics were lukewarm, 69% on Rotten Tomatoes against 47 on Metacritic, but its April 2022 opening weekend set a record for a video game adaptation in the United States and Canada, on the way to $405 million worldwide.