Sonic the Hedgehog seems impossible to kill now. The blue blur has three hit movies behind him, a fourth on the way, and a steady presence across games and animation. For a character celebrating his 35th anniversary, that sounds like business as usual. According to the person responsible for guiding the franchise, it almost wasn’t. Sonic has survived plenty of rough patches, and fans have stuck with him through all of them. That loyalty kept the character recognizable even when Sega’s confidence in the series was wavering. It took an unlikely box office hit to change how the company saw his future.
Sonic Creative Officer Takashi Iizuka says Sega executives once wanted to cancel the entire franchise, and the success of 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog movie changed its course. Speaking recently during an interview at Tokyo Game Show, Iizuka recalled being told by higher-ups during the series’ worst periods that it should end. He said he fought within Sega to keep Sonic going and called the first movie the biggest milestone in the franchise’s turnaround.
“There had been good times, and there had been bad times,” Iizuka said. “During the worst times, I was told by the higher-ups that we should cancel the entire franchise.” He described the movie as a major hit that “definitely changed the course of this franchise.” Iizuka did not identify when those conversations happened or suggest that cancellation was still imminent when the movie premiered.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
Advertisement
🎄Die Hard
Advertisement
01
How does a room know you’ve walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
Advertisement
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
Advertisement
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
Advertisement
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you’re actually made of.
Advertisement
05
There’s a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
Advertisement
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
Advertisement
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
Advertisement
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Advertisement
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
Advertisement
John Wick · Chapters 1–4 · 2014–2023
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him.
You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it.
Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise.
People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
Advertisement
The Fast and the Furious · Fast X · 2001–2023
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to.
You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason.
You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Advertisement
Mission: Impossible · The Final Reckoning · 1996–2025
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left.
You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error.
You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Advertisement
Die Hard · A Good Day to Die Hard · 1988–2013
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable.
You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
Advertisement
The Sonic Movies Gave Sega a Very Different Problem
Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails in ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’Image via Paramount Pictures
The first movie’s path to theaters was hardly reassuring at the start. Its initial Sonic design drew such a strong backlash that the character was completely redesigned before release, making the movie look like another potential headache for the franchise. Instead, audiences embraced it, and the movies have since introduced Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Shadow to viewers who may never have picked up one of the games. Iizuka says those newer fans are also changing what people want from Sonic himself. In the same interview, Iizuka said some fans who found Sonic through movies and animation place greater emphasis on story. He wants future games to respond to that interest while keeping video games at the center of the franchise. That gives the movies a role beyond selling tickets: they have helped shape the audience Sonic Team now makes games for.
Advertisement
Sega’s plans today sound far removed from the conversations Iizuka remembers having with executives. He pointed to a new Netflix cartoon, Sonic the Hedgehog 4, and plans to release some form of Sonic media almost every year. The first movie did more than prove Sonic could work on the big screen. For Iizuka, it helped secure the future of a franchise he had already fought to keep alive.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login