User:SonicFTW/sandbox/Sonic the Hedgehog (Cancelled Sony Pictures Live-Action Film)/What if Sony Made a SONIC THE HEDGEHOG Movie?

By Rinzler Productions


 * 1) In December of 2013, it was revealed that Sony Pictures have registered three domains for Sonic the Hedgehog movie websites. Sonic fans became very hopeful that an announcement of a Sonic movie would be coming soon, and their wish was indeed granted on June 10th 2014, when it was announced that Sony had partnered up with Marza Animation Planet Studios, to make a live-action animated hybrid version of Sonic the Hedgehog. Marza was well-known already at this point for creating some truly stunning animated cutscenes for the games. Sony and Sega were each going to be covering half of the production expenses, and what was imagined to be a lucrative joint venture.
 * 2) Now this was of course huge news for Sonic fans, as the previous versions of the movie such as Wonders of the World and Armageddon were never announced to the public, so the fact that this one was was already a very good sign. Hope was very high that this would be the studio to get the job done. It was soon after announced that the movie would be produced by Neal H Moritz under his own production company Original Film. Now honestly he's not that surprising a choice considering he's successfully revitalised for other old brands for Sony, such as the Jump Street movies, and would go out to do so again later with Goosebumps. Now Mie Onishi and Takeshi Ito from Marza Animation would also serve as producers, while Toby Ascher would serve as an executive producer. Writing duties would go to Van Robichaux and Evan Susser. Now Marza seem to think that Sony were absolutely perfect for the job, due to their experience working on other live-action animated hybrids, like The Smurfs. Oh, okay. Maybe they weren't such a good choice based on that. But despite that, Sony themselves had all the confidence in the world, and felt there was an endless amount of stories to tell and characters to feature. At least three movies were in the pipeline and while they never outright stated this, I'm pretty sure the plan was to create a cinematic universe for Sonic that would run alongside their other planned cinematic universes based on Robin Hood and The Amazing Spider-Man, that they were developing around the same time period.
 * 3) Now it would be confirmed that this movie would have no inspiration for the plot of the games at all, and instead would be a wholly original story, but still feature what fans like about the character. Now supposedly this movie ACTUALLY would have been basically the same version we got in 2020, except that the animation would have been done right the first time (Can we get a hallelujah?), Eggman was expected to be animated instead of live-action and Chris Pratt was reportedly the original choice for the role of Tom Wachowski, instead of James Marsden.
 * 4) Things however started to get weird for this movie, as Sony stated absolutely nothing about the movie about the next couple of years, except to announce that Tim Miller (director of the first Deadpool movie) will be the movie's new executive producer, and that the movie was now going to be delayed to 2018, instead of its original plan release of 2016. Now in 2017, it would be officially announced that Sony no longer would be producing the Sonic movie. Now the reason for this was that Sony declared Sonic to be a turnaround, which basically meant that they considered it as a loss on their taxes. This meant that they can get paid compensation for their losses, but they wouldn't be able to actually make the movie, so basically they decided that it wasn't worth making. So the rights went up in the air and Paramount jumped into the opportunity to make a Sonic movie. Now luckily Paramount kept most of the staff from the previous movie, and the movie ended up being a rousing success, which would spawn a sequel that is only months away from a release at the time of recording.