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One of the 2024 movies still making a name in the new year is director Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3. Released for the holiday season, people continue to talk about things like Jim Carrey’s dual performances as the two Robotnik family members as a highlight of the entire affair. While it does break the canon of the Sega video games, the writing team admitted that it was done in a way that actually makes total sense.
Speaking with our sister site Total Film, co-writers Pat Casey and Josh Miller laid out the huge change that saw Gerald Robotnik removed from Sonic Adventure 2’s flashback-exclusive past and put into Sonic 3’s actively-dangerous present. Casey in particular laid out the road to making this decision, courtesy of this chain of thought:
The biggest change, really, was making it so Gerald is still alive; bringing Gerald into the present instead of only being a flashback villain who exists only in the past, because there’s just a limit to how many flashbacks we want to have. We wanted to make him more of a present danger, giving us a real villain, because we knew from the beginning we wanted to find an opportunity to get Sonic and Ivo more stuff together. So the idea of them teaming up was a big thing on the to do list, even though obviously any such team up was always temporary.
It’s funny that Pat Casey mentioned how he and Josh Miller wanted to watch the number of flashbacks that were included in Sonic the Hedgehog 3, especially when that same device was used to bolster the presence of another character. As I had discussed in my own interview with this writing team, Sonic 3’s spoilery Commander Walters storyline was helped by the fact that the G.U.N. bigwig became one of the only people to know about Shadow (Keanu Reeves) – save for Gerald Robotnik himself.
While it’s also true that having both Gerald and Ivo in the same timeline allowed for a lot of Jim Carrey’s critically-acclaimed double handed shenanigans, there’s one more practical purpose this Sonic 3 switcheroo had to serve. As Josh Miller shared in his continued remarks, a huge theme of the overall franchise benefitted from making this change:
It became such a big thing in the Sonic movie franchise that Ivo is an orphan, so it was just hard to resist the idea of what would happen if he suddenly found out that he has a family member. Since the Sonic movies are all about found family.
Much as any hero needs a darker mirror of what their life could have been, giving Ivo Robotnik a little bit of brightness through rediscovering his grandfather made the story for this installment even more rewarding. On the funnier side, the decision to put Gerald Robotnik into the modern day allowed for Sonic the Hedgehog 3’s iconic Robotnik laser dance to be possible.
However the drama involved in Paramount and Sega’s latest box office hit also gives a depth to Sonic 3 most probably weren’t expecting. Yes, I’m being properly cryptic, as I think people should still see Sonic the Hedgehog 3 in its theatrical run! Seriously, there’s a pretty huge reason this Robotnik canon crush works, but you need to see the movie to know about it.
Also, if you want to revisit Sonic’s previous films, as well as the Knuckles standalone spinoff series, a Paramount+ subscription is all you’ll need to get up to speed. And speaking of Speed, check out more from my interview with Pat Casey & Josh Miller, as they told me about a Keanu Reeves reference that almost made Sonic 3.