Published Sep 25, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT
Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider’s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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