During a promotional interview for the upcoming Sonic Frontiers, Sonic Team head Takashi Iizuka was asked about the possibility of incorporating elements from the wildly successful live-action adaptations, and his response will undoubtedly relieve those who do not want the poison of Hollywood to enter the franchise's already buggy and frequently poor-playing games.

While "Movie Sonic" appeared as a guest character in a mobile game, Takashi Iizuka stated that the Sonic the Hedgehog games will only feature Sonic's game iteration and not his movie iteration:

“Because the movie Sonic came from where the game started, trying to take the movie qualities and stick it back into the games doesn’t really work well.

What I want to do is stay faithful to our game Sonic and really expand on the game Sonic to incorporate new ideas that are going to get people excited about new games.

In our mobile games, we do have ‘Movie Sonic’ appearing as a guest character, and that kind of collaboration feels really good because there are people who saw the movie and only understand the character through that.

But the game Sonic is really the core essence of the character, so instead of trying to take the movie and put it inside of the game, I really wanted to expand on the game to make it appealing to everyone.

I think having Movie Sonic as a guest character is viable and certainly something that we’re going to do, but keeping the essence and core of Sonic in the games and then expanding out is probably what I’d prefer to do, rather than try to shoehorn in [the movie].”

Takashi Iizuka noted that the success of the movies has actually garnered them a much larger audience, and they’re pushing themselves to make even better games to properly welcome new fans:

“Because of the success of the movies, we’re finding that we’re reaching into this wider audience of people who maybe never played the game before, or don’t play them that much. It’s this wider group of fans who we need to start now making content for.

Honestly, it makes us all very happy, because we have more people now that we can bring content to. It is a challenge though, because we have maybe new gamers or people who haven’t played previous Sonic games, so we don’t think we can go out there with on single game that will make the entire audience excited.”