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Sonic the Hedgehog Movie & Terminator 6 Releasing 1 Week Earlier
Paramount Pictures has done some release date shuffling, moving both the Sonic the Hedgehog live-action/CGI movie and Terminator 6 up one week on the schedule. In addition, Paramount has pushed back the long-awaited sequel Top Gun: Maverick all the way to June 2020, one year later than the originally announced release date of July 12th, 2019. The Top Gun sequel will now share the summer with the sequel to A Quiet Place, which is targeted for release in May 2020.
Paramount has had a largely successful 2018 thanks to A Quiet Place, which grossed $332 million worldwide, and to Top Gun 2 star Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible - Fallout, with its $540 million worldwide tally. The studio is hoping to continue that momentum into 2019 and are counting on both Sonic the Hedgehog, an adaptation of the iconic video game, as well as the reboot Terminator 6, to be a big part of their box office plan for that year.
Deadline reports Sonic the Hedgehog will now release on November 8, 2019. Terminator 6, on the other hand, will move up to November 15, 2019. Like Top Gun: Maverick, Terminator 6 is a co-production with Skydance.
Thanks to the new release date, Sonic the Hedgehog will find itself going up against the second week of Warner Bros.' Wonder Woman 1984, which is set for November 1. Terminator 6, meanwhile, remains somewhat clear of the sure-to-be popular Wonder Woman sequel, while also moving off the release date currently claimed by Fox for an as-yet-unannounced Marvel movie. One guess is that the planned X-Force movie, to star Deadpool as well as Cable and Domino, will ultimately land in that November slot. Given the more mature subject matter of Deadpool/X-Force, Paramount may have thought it prudent to get the adult-targeted Terminator 6 out a week earlier to avoid the competition.
Without doubt, both Sonic and Terminator 6 figure to be big franchise plays for Paramount in 2019. With Sonic, the studio hopes to pull off the relatively rare feat of releasing a video-game-based movie that actually overcomes the dreaded video game movie curse. Jim Carrey has jumped aboard the endeavor to play the Sonic villain Dr. Robotnik, so the movie should definitely have some wild comedy mixed in with the super-charged Sonic antics. Meanwhile, on Terminator 6, James Cameron returns to the franchise as producer with hopes of cleaning the slate and kicking off a rebooted series built around the new characters of Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) and a brand new Terminator (Gabriel Luna), with Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to bridge the gap with the original movies. It remains to be seen if Paramount will have a pair of winners on their hands when they drop Sonic the Hedgehog and Terminator 6 in November of 2019, on slightly different dates than originally planned.
KEY RELEASE DATES
- Sonic the Hedgehog (2019) release date: Nov 15, 2019
- Terminator 6 (2019) release date: Nov 22, 2019
- Top Gun: Maverick/Top Gun 2 (2019) release date: Jun 26, 2020
- Wonder Woman 2 (2019) release date: Nov 01, 2019
