The Sonic the Hedgehog film series won’t follow the chronological order of the games.
Speaking to IGN, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 director Jeff Fowler stated the films will be a melting pot of ideas rather than directly paralleling the game series.
“It’s not always going to be a linear progression of like ‘Oh, this was in Sonic 2 so it’s going to be in the Sonic 2 film’,” he said. “It’s going to be a little bit of a cherry picking, a little bit of a melting pot. There’s so much great, inspiring imagery to pull from the 30 years of games. So if we didn’t get it in one film, there’s always the chance that we’ll revisit it somewhere else.”
The new Sonic film, released in cinemas on Friday, takes inspiration from multiple games in the series, most notably Sonic 2 and Sonic 3 & Knuckles.
And as previously reported, this is all part of a Sonic cinematic universe, with a third film already in production.
Fowler told IGN he has a “back pocket full of stuff” for future films.
“It’s also exciting for the fans to not know what’s going to come in where,” he said, “rather than just knowing we’re going down a checklist from A to B to C to D.”
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 already includes ideas leftover from the first film, such as Labyrinth Zone from Sonic 1.
“I was still working my way through some of the iconic imagery that we weren’t able to do in the first film because it was a more grounded story,” he said. “It was a road trip, so it would have been strange for them to find themselves in a labyrinth. But I always loved that visual, so we kind of brought that into this.”
One of the film’s most iconic moments, taken from Sonic 2, was intended from the start.
“The image of Tails flying the Tornado, the bi-plane, and delivering Sonic into battle from the end of Sonic 2. That is as iconic as it gets,” said Fowler.
“From the very early days of planning this film it was like ‘We’ve got to get to here’. It’s going to make fans go nuts, it’s such a great image.
“It felt cinematic, it felt huge. Right from the early days, we thought that should be part of the story.”
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