Sega Planned to Kill Sonic the Hedgehog Before Movie Success

Sega bosses were ready to ditch Sonic the Hedgehog before the franchise's hugely-successful live-action movie helped change their minds.

That's according to Sonic Team leader and development veteran Takashi Iizuka, who has worked as a designer, director and producer on more than 30 games featuring Sega's mascot over the past three decades.

While the idea of Sega ditching Sonic seems shocking — akin to Pokémon abandoning Pikachu, or Mario shaving off his moustache — the Sonic series has certainly faced some tough years. Indeed, as Iizuka has now admitted, his tenure in charge of the blue blur included "good times" and also "the worst times."

"It has been 35 years, which means it has been longer than actually my children, so I look upon this franchise like sort of like my own son," Iizuka told One More Game. "There had been good times, and there had been bad times... during the worst times, I was told by the higher-ups that we should cancel the entire franchise.

"I had to fight within the organization to keep the franchise as long as possible," Iizuka continued. "The biggest milestone for me was the first movie, that had been a great hit and definitely changed the course of this franchise."

Released in 2020, the first Sonic movie ended up earning a surprisingly solid $320 million and kickstarting a successful blockbuster franchise — though its success was far from assured. The series almost failed before it ever got started after the movie's first trailer was widely mocked for its "ugly" Sonic design, including horrible teeth. In a now-legendary move, Sega then decided to delay the movie to completely revise Sonic's design, ensuring it more closely matched the hedgehog's in-game appearance — and the rest is history.

Now, Sega has plans to continue pushing Sonic further beyond games, even if the hedgehog's foundation will remain on PC and consoles. Next year will see the launch of a fourth Sonic movie, a Netflix animation series is on the way, and Iizuka has said he expects "some sort of media almost every year from here on out."

"The franchise itself is rooted in video games," Iizuka concluded, confirming that Sega had no plans to ditch Sonic anymore. "We're just going to base everything upon the video games. That's our core principle."

What's next for Sega's Sonic game series? Iizuka says he has identified a desire from fans for more "more emphasis on story. So in coming years, I really want to create some game that has more emphasis on story." Iizuka also said he'd like to include more Shadow the Hedgehog, a character that he and an increasingly vocal group of fans both seem to enjoy. "If you have played Sonic Adventure 2, people may know that Shadow basically sort of died at the end of that game," Iizuka noted. "We were originally intending to just kind of 'die the character out' [kill him off'], but the character Shadow was just so very popular that we decided to revive him in Sonic Heroes."

In the meantime, Sonic the Hedgehog 4 launches in theaters on March 19, and the character is currently involved in a major crossover with Fortnite.