Taking “Gotta go fast” to a new, extremely corporate studio-focused level, Paramount announced today that it’s fast-tracking its recent chili-dog scarfing video game adaptation, Sonic The Hedgehog, for a home video release. Featuring Ben Schwartz, Jim Carrey, and a scene in which James Marsden pointedly suggests that Sonic might have shit himself after cutting a particularly juicy fart, the film originally arrived in theaters back on February 14.
Sonic is only the latest movie to get accelerated toward the home market in the wake of the nation-wide closing of America’s theaters, following in the footsteps of movies like Bloodshot, The Way Back, and—just today—Pixar’s latest release, Onward. The major difference is that Sonic actually pretty much already got its full theatrical run; although it brought in about a million dollars at the domestic box office as recently as last weekend, it still managed to get a month out in the wild before people had to start contemplating whether watching Adam Pally point a gun at someone was worth risking possible COVID-19 infection. (And really, we could go either way; Pally’s having a lot of fun.)
The irony, of course, is that Sonic is all about avoiding social isolation; the first 15 minutes of the movie are pretty much all about the titular speedster going slowly insane because of a lack of human contact. There are also plenty of scenes of Carrey getting his respiratory droplets all up in a whole bunch of people’s faces, which might be worrying depending on your personal aversion to human contact right now. On the other hand, it has a bit where he dismisses a character he’s just met as “collateral damage,” and that’s a pretty cruel bit of funny, too.
Sonic The Hedgehog arrives on digital streaming on March 31, ahead of a physical release on May 19.