The Sonic the Hedgehog movies, based on the long-running video game franchise, have overall been fantastic so far. They’ve proven to be a massive step forward for movies based on video games and are a blast for audiences of all ages. Paramount Pictures has shown they care about adapting the games in a way that fans are happy with while also providing enjoyable stories for newcomers.

However, there is one notable issue holding them back from being as great as they have the potential to be. That big problem is that the human characters, the ones who aren’t based on anyone seen in the source material, steal a lot of screen time away from the anthropomorphic animals that audiences are there to see.

The only characters from the source material who appeared in the first film were the titular Sonic the Hedgehog and Jim Carrey’s Dr. Robotnik, with Tails showing up in a post-credits scene. The story of the second movie is entirely interrupted for a side quest for a couple of the human characters and a wedding. The Knuckles TV series is more about the character of Wade Whipple than it is about Knuckles.

Characters like Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles should be the focus of Sonic the Hedgehog films. Otherwise it’s like having a Justice League movie that focuses on Alfred and Commissioner Godron. It just feels weird. It’s not quite what people want to see from these movies.

The human characters and their part of the story isn’t bad by any means. In fact, they do offer up plenty of entertainment and add to the heart of the stories. It’s just not all blended as well as it should be. It’s fine to keep these humans around, especially now that they’re established and have relationships with these otherworldly animals, but the focus needs to be shifted much more in favor of the actual Sonic characters.

After the complaints made about the otherwise fun Knuckles series on Paramount+, hopefully they fix this issue for future projects. This is one movie universe that deserves to take off. If they were willing to change the original design of Sonic due to fan backlash, surely they’d be able to fix this.

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