Sonic is on his way to the big screen. Let’s hope it’s not game over for the hedgehog hero (Picture: YouTube / Sega)

Lovers of little blue ring-collecting video game legends, listen up. Sonic The Hedgehog is back. Again. And this time he’s bound for the big screen.

Yes, according to Variety, the speedy little critter’s adventures are being turned into a movie, courtesy of Sony Pictures and Japanese company Marza Animation.

Although little is known about the project at this stage, reports have suggested that the film will be a mix of live-action and animation (we assume Sonic will be the latter, as opposed to some bloke wandering around in a giant blue hedgehog costume).

And we can also expect appearances from many of the franchise’s best-known characters, including Sonic’s arch nemesis Dr Eggman – with producers assuring us that the character comes complete with ‘limitless’ stories to tell.




Let’s just hope that Sonic the Movie is a bit better than some of these video-game-to-movie predecessors – although judging by some of the below he won’t have to try too hard…

Super Mario Bros (1993)

‘They’re brothers. They’re plumbers. They’re ‘- actually let’s just leave it there shall we? Once an innocent Nintendo game featuring cute mushroom-eating dinosaurs and oh-so-late-80s pixels, Super Mario Bros the movie was so terrible on every level that even the late, lamented Bob Hoskins described it as ‘the worst thing I ever did’.

He wasn’t far wrong there.

Street Fighter (1994)

It does have Jean-Claude Van Damme in it. We’ll give it that. But possibly the worst thing about Street Fighter is how it tries to make out it’s a serious, portentous account of a potential doomsday scenario (just listen to all that ‘fate of the world’ stuff in the trailer) when ultimately it’s just an hour and a half of badly-costumed people kicking each other (albeit with added Kylie Minogue, not that this improves matters much).

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1998)

The original Mortal Kombat movie was good trashy fun (at least from the point of view of someone who notched up far too many misspent hours being messily dispatched by Kitana in the mid-90s), but the sequel? We don’t want to talk about it, we’re still traumatized.

Wing Commander (1999)

Wing Commander the game was unbelievably popular (and from a graphics and gameplay point of view pretty darned good). Wing Commander the movie on the other hand? Hmmmm, you kind of lost us at the use of the words ‘Freddie Prinze Jr’.

Doom (2005)

Memo to film producers: Running around dark perilous corridors when one is in control of a games console is exciting and fun. Watching someone else do it on a big screen (in similarly murky light) is, how shall we put this, not. Even when Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is involved.

Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time (2010)

The original Prince Of Persia was a classic platform game with the sort of slightly clunky graphics that you’d never dream of witnessing on this side of the 1980s. The film, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so entertaining (despite looking a tad more expensive). But at least you got to see Jake Gyllenhaal’s biceps.