'Sonic the Hedgehog 3' was "trickier" to make than the first two films.
Creative partnership Pat Casey and Josh Miller have written the screenplays for all three instalments of the franchise - which is based on Sega's iconic video game series of the same name - and explained that the whole process was still "fun" but became a bit more difficult with the inclusion of new antagonist Shadow (Keanu Reeves).
Josh told ScreenRant: "It was both fun and tricky compared to the first two films. As a 'Sonic' fan, you know, those are drawing from games that had much more rudimentary storylines. Like, for Knuckles, it was pretty much just, 'He's trying to guard the Emerald, Robotnik's manipulating him into thinking that Sonic is a bad guy, and then at some point, he realizes the truth, and they team up."
But Pat noted that was actually a good thing because it gave them a "broad outline" to work with in the end.
He said: "And that was great, because that gave us a broad outline, but then everything else we could just make what we wanted. Whereas for this one, we really wanted to be true to Shadow's emotional story, and the Maria stuff, even though some details were changed to sort of simplify things, or make things make a little more sense within the context of our real world that these movies take place. Whereas in the Sonic Adventure games, there's humans, but it's like, 'Is that our world? Is that another world?'"
Josh explained that it was "definitely trickier" even though in the end they just like to throw ideas at their director, although there was some "concern" about new character Maria (Alyla Browne), who is the granddaughter of Gerland Robotnik.
He said: "Yeah, so it was definitely trickier, and we feel like our job on this franchise is to just kind of blast Jeff Fowler with ideas, and he serves as the filter through what makes it in the movie. We know he was very concerned with getting the Maria elements and all that backstory stuff correct."
For the third film, Jim Carrey has returned to his role as Doctor Eggman and while the writing duo have "no idea" how production company Paramount got him to agree to it, Pat noted that there was always the "caveat" that their work would be "attractive" enough for him to sign up again.
He said: "But with the caveat of like, as long as we make this attractive for him. So definitely, we wanted to come up with something really good that's not a repeat, because Jim doesn't want to repeat himself. We had to give him something fresh to play, and giving him two characters, and also really sending Ivo on this emotional journey with a little bit of a redemption arc, teaming Ivo up with Sonic. We wanted to make it so attractive to Jim that when he saw it, there was no way he could say no."
