Paramount is expanding the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise with the upcoming Knuckles streaming series and, once that premieres on Paramount+ later this month, we have a third movie to look forward to.
Talking to Paste (via GameFragger.com), franchise and series executive producer Toby Asche shed new light on how the TV series came to be and teased plans for the world of Sonic is going to get bigger and better. That means future movies will be much grander in scale than those action-packed first two efforts.
"We got really excited about the idea of expanding our characters in our world into television, specifically, because it gives us a platform to really do character studies," he explains. "We knew that, with Shadow coming into Sonic 3 and some of the bigger things that we want to do, the Sonic franchise on the movie side is going to be these Avengers-level events."
"They’re going to be these big, exciting stories that have a lot of different characters," Asche continues. "And so what television did for us is it gave us time to go into some of the more supporting characters in depth and really build them out in cool ways."
As for what led to Sonic the Hedgehog being brought to television with the Knuckles series, he says the second movie's fish-out-of-water humour played a big role in that show getting the green light.
"We thought we could translate that into a full series. I think it’s by far the funniest version we’ve had in any of the Sonic movies so far. It leans into weird comedy partially because of Adam Pally and because of what Idris brings in a really great way."
"We also really, really liked the idea of going linearly through the games, and then in the third movie, being able to do a Sonic 3 and Knuckles super Easter egg," Ascher says of how the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 video game ties into the upcoming movie.
Jeff Fowler will be back in the director's chair for the threequel, with Ben Schwartz (Sonic the Hedgehog), Colleen O'Shaughnessey (Miles "Tails" Prower), Idris Elba (Knuckles the Echidna), James Marsden (Tom Wachowski), Tika Sumpter (Maddie Wachowski), and Jim Carrey (Dr. Robotnik) all set to reprise their respective roles from the first two movies.
New additions to the franchise will include Krysten Ritter (Jessica Jones), Alyla Browne (Furiosa), James Wolk (Harley Quinn), Sofia Pernas (Jane the Virgin), Cristo Fernández (Ted Lasso), and Jorma Taccone (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse).
Knuckles is set to premiere on Paramount+ on April 26, while Sonic the Hedgehog 3 will race into theaters on December 20.