Sonic Sets Major Box Office Record for Video Game Movies

Sonic the Hedgehog surpassed Pokemon: Detective Pikachu in North America (to become the biggest video game movie ever in domestic earnings, is setting a new milestone for the newly innovated live action film.

Sonic the Hedgehog will pass the $144 million domestic cume of Justice Smith and Ryan Reynolds’ Pokémon: Detective Pikachu. Sonic the Hedgehog, starring Ben Shwartz, James Marsden and Jim Carrey, will be the biggest grossing video game-based movie ever in unadjusted domestic grosses.

It still has to hit $156 million domestic, which is now a coin toss, to get past the inflation-adjusted grosses of Pokémon: The First Movie ($85 million in 1999) and Mortal Kombat ($70 million in 1995), but it’s now almost certain to be the first video game-based movie to top $150 million domestic. The inflation-adjusted cume of Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider ($131 million in 2001/$211 million)

The $85 million-budgeted movie, involving the iconic video game character sonic passed the $300 million unadjusted global total of Resident Evil: Afterlife ($60 million domestic and $300 million global in 2010). It should be just over/under the $312 million global cume of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (including just $26 million domestic but $154 million in China alone in 2017).

If the movie ends up short of $330 million in the end, it’ll be below only Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($90 million domestic and $330 million global in 2010), Angry Birds ($107 million/$352 million in 2016), Rampage ($101 million/$428 million in 2018), Detective Pikachu ($144 million/$430 million in 2019) and Warcraft ($48 million domestic/$438 million in 2016).