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James Marsden, not Paul Rudd, is bringing your second favourite video game character to the big screen

A sexy Sonic?

James Marsden, not Paul Rudd, is bringing your second favourite video game character to the big screen
30 May 2018

Sonic The Hedgehog is a thing you remember, from the past, about a hedgehog, a blue one, who could run very fast and do loop-the-loops in a ball. It was very fun and good and colourful and the music on the second level used to make you cry but let’s not get into that now. Anyway, besides a number of TV shows, the character has never had himself a big-screen outing, presumably because Super Mario Bros did, and, well, everyone thought it was a bad piece of big crap.*

Still, that was ages ago, and today is today, so enough time has passed that it’s a good idea to make a Sonic The Hedgehog film again. And it seems that it’s gathering a nice cloud of steam, because James Marsden - from the movie Hey I’m Cyclops! and the popular ‘television show’ Westworld - has been attached to star in the film.

He’s not going to be sticking on a big blue hedgehog costume though - the character will be CGI of course, because it’s 2018, and it’s not It’s A Knockout

He’ll most likely be playing a human character, a cop (named ‘Tom’ apparently) who befriends the spiked hero and teams up with him to stop the evil Dr. Robotnik - yep, we’ve got a mix of live-action and CGI with this baby.

It was Paul Rudd (Hey I’m Ant-Man!) who was previously attached to play this part, but it seems that Paramount have ruled him out almost as soon as the rumours surfaced that he was involved. How fickle this hedgehog business is!

An artist’s rendering of what Sonic might look like in the new movie

The movie has been in development since 2014, and will be directed by Oscar-nominated animator/filmmaker Jeff Fowler and written by Patrick Casey and Josh Miller (who wrote a film called Hey, Stop Stabbing Me!, for your confidence), and it’ll have a reported budget of $90 million. $80 million of which will presumably go to the missing link between the animal kingdom and the humans, Andy Serkis, to mo-cap a hedgehog by curling up into a big ball and getting run over by a car for the film’s shocking climax. Rumours unconfirmed.

Anyway, it’s due to start shooting this summer in Vancouver, ready for a 2019 release date.

*They were wrong. I recommend re-watching it again - it’s a misunderstood classic if there ever was one.

(Images: Getty/Youtube)