Sonic Movie Crosses $200 Million in Worldwide Ticket Sales

23 February, 2020 31 December, 2024

Fans and families came out in earnest to support the Sonic movie on Saturday, after it looked like newcomer Call of the Wild would dethrone the hedgehog from the top box office spot.

Paramount now estimates through Deadline that the movie will add $26.3 million this weekend to its domestic haul. It appears that will be enough to take the #1 spot again. That number is under some early estimates that had the movie making $30 million or more this weekend, and for a moment on Saturday, it looked like Call of the Wild, a new film starring Harrison Ford, would wage a strong competition for the top position and knock off Sonic in shocking fashion, after Friday revenues reported a better than expected debut.

Now, it appears Sonic is back in the driver’s seat through the first week of March.

Worldwide markets outpaced North America. The Sonic movie is estimated by Deadline to have made $38.3 million overseas this weekend with the opening in additional countries like Russia.

That data, paired with steady ticket sales during the week prior, means that by the end of today, the Sonic movie will have made over $203.1 million worldwide, in just 11 days. That is well ahead of estimates, and it could mean the movie becomes profitable by the end of the month, clearing the way for that sequel many assume will happen.

Sonic was to open in China on Friday. Precautions taken by the country in light of the spread of coronavirus there have almost guaranteed that will not happen. Still, in the more than 50 countries the movie has opened, nearly all have seen Sonic shoot to the top of the box office results.

2 Comments

Sonic is the best crossover genre star since The Rock. They should be in a movie together. The Rock should play the president. But seriously this is fantastic news!

Yep, it is! It’s likely the best movie adaptation of a video game I have seen. True, having seen Sonic over the weekend, I still find Wreck It Ralph as much more polished movie, but it’s not in the same genre. The biggest win here is Sonic has finally broken the curse and proven that you indeed can make a good video game movie and make good money with it at box office.

Now, that all said, I really wish the Sonic movie would have embraced its source material more and not used the buddy-cop approach. I think they were afraid of embracing it and instead used this old, tired trope to try to make his content more relatable or palatable for the masses. That said, it worked extremely well, actually, and the lead roles of cop and hedgehog showed amazing chemistry.

I did feel that the first 30 minutes had a bit too much filler (the turtle gag and the commentary on Sonic spying on the people of the city) that could have been condensed into 3 minutes and been instead filled with useful plot points instead, such as flashbacks into Eggman and Sonic’s lives. That’s why I rate this movie around a 7.5 to an 8. It’s a solid, good movie, but it’s not amazing or even very good. But hopefully just like Sonic 2 the game was to Sonic 1 in raising the bar, we’ll see a huge uptick in quality of story when the sequel comes out in a few years.

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