The big baddie from the video games, Shadow, makes his debut with Keanu Reeves voicing the sinister speedster.
The wait is finally over. The day after Paramount and Sega teased fans with projections of characters onto buildings, declaring that the trailer was heading our way, the Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer has made its way online. The mood for this installment is more ominous as a new mysterious threat is unleashed on our world and is revealed to have origins that mirror Sonic’s.
The official synopsis from Paramount reads,
“Sonic the Hedgehog returns to the big screen this holiday season in his most thrilling adventure yet. Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails reunite against a powerful new adversary, Shadow, a mysterious villain with powers unlike anything they have faced before. With their abilities outmatched in every way, Team Sonic must seek out an unlikely alliance in hopes of stopping Shadow and protecting the planet.”
Jeff Fowler returns to direct Sonic the Hedgehog 3 from a screenplay by Pat Casey, Josh Miller, and John Whittington, based on a story by Casey and Miller. Ben Schwartz returns as the voice of Sonic the Hedgehog, with Idris Elba (Knuckles), Colleen O’Shaughnessey (Tails), James Marsden (Tom Wachowski), Tika Sumpter (Maddie Wachowski), Tom Butler (Commander Walters), Lee Majdoub (Agent Stone), and Jim Carrey (Dr. Robotnik). Newcomers to the fast-paced and family-friendly franchise include Keanu Reeves as Shadow the Hedgehog, Krysten Ritter as Captain Rockwell, and Alyla Browne as Maria.
Executive producers on this new entry include Haruki Satomi, Shuji Utsumi, Yukio Sugino, Jeff Fowler, Tommy Gormley and Tim Miller. Neal H. Moritz, Toby Ascher, Toru Nakahara and Hitoshi Okuno are on board as the producers of this sequel.
With the recent Knuckles spin-off series and this new installment introducing Shadow, Sonic producer Toby Ascher has a vision that the property can grow to become “Avengers-level.” Ascher states, “We got really excited about the idea of expanding our characters in our world into television, specifically, because it gives us a platform to really do character studies. We knew that, with Shadow coming into Sonic 3 and some of the bigger things that we want to do, the Sonic franchise on the movie side is going to be these Avengers-level events. They’re going to be these big, exciting stories that have a lot of different characters.”