'Sonic' Boom: Not Every Franchise (Including James Bond) Needs to Spawn A Cinematic Universe

Paramount's unassuming, regularly scheduled video game-based adventures show why not every hit needs to spawn an epic trilogy or endless spin-offs

Paramount and Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3 has surpassed $100 million overseas in a franchise-best nine days. With $279 million worldwide thus far, it will probably top $300 million worldwide by the end of this sentence. Its end-of-Sunday global cume, including how it opens this weekend in Brazil, Italy and South Korea (where Sonic 2 earned a combined $19 million overall in 2022), should be around $315 million. With another installment loosely set for early 2027, Sonic the Hedgehog is a refreshingly old-fashioned theatrical series, perhaps the closest thing we have to the James Bond series. Viewed through that prism, the video game-based cinematic series stands as strong evidence that not every theatrical success needs to be an explicitly connected and ever-expanding cinematic universe. Sometimes, a new movie every two or three years is enough.