'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' Trailer Carreys Double The Stakes With Shadow Unleashed
The long-anticipated threequel trailer reveals Keanu Reeves’s performance as the ultimate weapon
It is August 27, 2024. With a December 20 release date, fans knew that the long awaited Sonic the Hedgehog 3 trailer would roll around eventually, even if not at the speed of sound. After being hyped for days, Paramount Pictures did indeed release the trailer Tuesday morning, giving the first full look at Shadow the Hedgehog, voiced by Keanu Reeves, after he was teased at the end of the previous film.
The trailer, which starts with reinforcing the positive influences Sonic, voiced once again by Ben Schwartz, has around him with his found family. Tom (James Marsden)’s speech is more in praise than his talk from the second film, although the blue hedgehog doesn’t quite understand. Since the end of the previous film, Shadow had indeed been brought to GUN facilities, but has facilitated a security breach, and so the organization calls in Sonic and his brother friends Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) to handle it. The film is heavily adapting Shadow’s debut game, Sonic Adventure 2, fully incorporating his tragic backstory, including Alyla Browne as Maria Robotnik, and he is quite the threat here, wreaking havoc on a city and the colorful bunch really isn’t up to par. They look to Doctor Robotnik for help, played once again by Jim Carrey. Shadow’s Chaos Control space and time-bending abilities are on full display, teleportation and all. He even gets his own bike to do the Akira slide with. There’s a bit of “Live and Learn” in there too. The trailer ends reuniting Ivo Robotnik with his grandfather Gerald, who is Shadow’s creator and also played by Carrey.
Carrey is playing multiple (non-alter ego) roles in a film for the first time since 2009’s A Christmas Carol, arguably the first live action instance. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 also features the returns of Tika Sumpter as Maddie Wachowski and Lee Majdoub as Agent Stone, Natasha Rothwell as Maddie’s sister Rachel, Shemar Moore as her husband, G.U.N. agent Randall Handel, Tom Butler as his boss, G.U.N. Commander Walters, Adam Pally as Wade Whipple fresh off his starring turn in the Knuckles miniseries, and Krysten Ritter in the decidedly human role of Director Rockwell, after speculation was abuzz that she might voice an Amy Rose or Rouge the Bat. It was Ritter herself who shared her character’s name with a screenshot of her in the film on Instagram, while the trades did not pick up. James Wolk, Sofia Pernas, Cristo Fernández, and The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, the latter of whom directed on the Knuckles series, also have roles. This very much was not any straight transplant of the CinemaCon sequence, though finding Dr. Robotnik lethargic and overweight was part of it.
Director Jeff Fowler considers Shadow to be one of his all-time favorite characters, and one of his first jobs in the visual effects industry was animating the character for the 2005 video game Shadow the Hedgehog, which the film likely draws from as well. The film was written by Pat Casey & Josh Miller and John Whittington, based on a story by the former pair. Neal H. Moritz, Toby Ascher, Toru Nakahara and Hitoshi Okuno produced alongside executive producers Fowler, Haruki Satomi, Shuji Utsumi, Yukio Sugino, Tommy Gormley and Tim Miller. Tom Holkenborg aka Junkie XL returns again to do the score as he had done for the first two films. This year’s films with his scores include Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is headed for battle opening alongside Mufasa: The Lion King on December 20. Currently the Paramount Pictures upload has 3.6 million views on YouTube, just under 200K more than the official Sonic channel’s upload.
Sources: Deadline, Jeff Fowler (1, 2), Krysten Ritter