It’s been five years since the original live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie, and in that time a lot of the sentiment around the series has changed. We’ve gone from being threatened with a horrifying blue gremlin on the big screen to a critically acclaimed adaptation of video game Sonic Adventure 2 in the third movie. Throughout three movies and a TV show, Paramount has been figuring out how best to balance its speedy anthropomorphic heroes and the human characters they live amongst. Fans have often argued that human characters—like James Marsden’s small-town cop, Tom—have taken valuable screen time away from Sonic and his friends. The Knuckles show barely even features the echidna, mostly focusing on the (debatable) comic relief cop, Wade. But now the movies are finally putting Sonic and company first, fans are conflicted on whether they’re ready to leave those human characters behind entirely.
In an interview with Screen Rant, Tails actor Colleen O’Shaughnessey talked about the possibility of a Sonic movie that focused solely on the blue blur and his animal friends. O’Shaughnessey says she thinks Sonic the Hedgehog 3 balanced human and animal heroes well and will continue to do so in future movies, but doesn’t deny that a future movie could leave characters like Tom behind.
“I mean, is it possible? Absolutely,” O’Shaughnessey told Screen Rant.
“You could do something with just the characters in this world. But I feel like this last movie, they did such a great job of balancing the two, so if they continue on their pattern, my guess is they’ll continue to do that. I think it does lend something to it. It definitely takes it out of a video game, and really helps ground it into a more real world situation, if that makes sense. So, like I said, I feel like they really did a great job of balancing, and could they keep adding more and more characters? For sure, there’s definitely enough characters to go around. But I think they’ll keep it with both. But what do I know? They don’t tell me anything.
Personally, I would be really bummed if the movies left behind the human characters entirely. A great strength of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is that it put the non-animal focus primarily on the human characters fans have come to care for, specifically Sonic’s human parents Tom and Maddie, and the villainous homoerotic duo Eggman and Agent Stone. Each of these characters was used to great effect, and fans now realize that they’ve grown attached to the humans Now that their screentime has started to dwindle (Marsden only has about seven minutes of screentime in Sonic the Hedgehog 3), people are wondering if they’ll stick around, especially as new Sonic characters are being introduced with each film.
My prediction is Paramount will keep the human characters around, but keep them in smaller supporting roles. You can’t get rid of these characters when Shadow still has to find his own family!. Give me an Agent Stone and Shadow team-up, Paramount. You know you want to.