The Sonic the Hedgehog movie has generated over $100 million (76.6m) on its opening weekend.
As reported by Comicbook, the success can be attributed to a number of fortuitous coincidences, not least the fact the movie debuted on Valentine’s Day and benefited from a long-weekend as our friends Stateside celebrated Presidents’ Day, during which it’s thought to have clocked up $68m (52m) at the box office.
The success can’t just be attributed to that, though, as it’s also thought to have generated $43m (33m) worldwide, too. So we’re all to blame, really.
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG
M Overseas Opening Weekend
0M Global Opening Weekend #SonicMovie #SonicTheHedgehog #CatchSonic #BoxOffice— Boxoffice Pro (@BoxOffice) February 16, 2020
We won’t find out the confirmed, final figures until next week and it remains to be seen if it’ll continue to be a box office pull, of course. While it has some way to go before it eclipses Detective Pikachu or Warcraft, for now it looks like Sonic the Hedgehog just be one of the most successful video game adaptations of all time, already surpassing other comparatively successful game-to-movie spin-offs like Street Fighter and Silent Hill.
“It’s not that the Sonic movie is bad, although it’s certainly not good,” Eurogamer editor Oli Welsh said in his review of the Sonic movie, calling it a “charmless cut-and-paste job”.
“It’s that it was a terrible idea from the start. It’s a formulaic cut-and-paste job from a Hollywood so starved of intellectual property that it will try making a movie about any recognisable character it can get its hands on – without asking who he is or why people liked him in the first place.”
