Sonic the Hedgehog director says movies won’t follow the same order as games

It seems that the Sonic the Hedgehog movies won't follow the order of the video games after all.

In an interview with IGN, director Jeff Fowler said that fans of the Sega classic shouldn't expect the film franchise to follow the games in chronological order. Instead, the franchise will go on to be a melting pot of ideas taken from multiple games.

“It's not always going to be a linear progression of like 'Oh, this was in Sonic 2 so it's going to be in the Sonic 2 film,'" Fowler explained. "It's going to be a little bit of a cherry-picking, a little bit of a melting pot. There's so much great, inspiring imagery to pull from the 30 years of games. So if we didn't get it in one film, there's always the chance that we'll revisit it somewhere else."

Last year, Fowler told Total Film that the franchise would, in fact, follow the original timeline.

"We're kind of working our way through the original timeline," Fowler had said. "You think about the first movie, it was just Sonic and Robotnik, the same way the first video game was. Then, Sonic 2 [with Tails] and then obviously Sonic and Knuckles."

If the movies were to follow the order of the games, the third film would see the return of Knuckles and introduce Doctor Robotnik's minion EggRobo. Regardless of the order, the Blue Bur has a total of 31 mainline video games, which gives Fowler and his team plenty of material to work with.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 hits theaters April 8. For more, check out our list of the best video game movies of all time.