Zelda vs. Sonic 4 Movie Box Office Battle - Who Wins?

With The Legend of Zelda live-action movie releasing on March 26, 2027, and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 dropping just one week earlier on March 19, 2027, Nintendo and Sega are heading for an epic box office battle.

Will Zelda’s fresh adventure win out, or will Sonic’s proven track record shine? What does the data show?

In this video, we'll give box office predictions based on factual box office data, discuss past video game movie adaptations, and more.

Let me know in the comments—which movie do you think will win?

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With the announcement that the live-action Legend of Zelda movie will be releasing March 26th, 2027, it’s become apparent that two titans will be going head-to-head—not only in the same month, but just one week apart.

Yes, the highly successful Sonic the Hedgehog film series will be getting a fourth installment on March 19th, 2027. Mathematicians will notice that’s just one week before the release of Nintendo’s high-budget, Avi Arad-produced Legend of Zelda movie.

Video Game Movie Performance

While the Sonic movies have been highly successful, with the third film (2024) grossing almost 500 million dollars worldwide at the box office, the second (2022) grossing just over 400 million, and the original (2020) grossing over 300 million, Nintendo’s history at the box office isn’t too bad either.

In fact, The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023) grossed over 1.3 billion dollars at the box office. Yes, that means the film outperformed all three Sonic movies combined.

However, the other (kinda) Nintendo movie, Detective Pikachu (2019), “only” grossed 433 million dollars worldwide, about on the level of the second and third Sonic movies. This is kind of surprising considering just how popular Pokemon is. However, both of these movie series are live-action. Sonic and Pokemon were competing against Mario, an animated movie.

Live-Action vs. Animated Video Game Movies

The Legend of Zelda film will be live-action, not animated, which means it’s possible that it could gross the same as Detective Pikachu and Sonic, and not approach Super Mario Bros.-level success.

Other live-action video game movies, like 2021’s Mortal Kombat, haven’t done as well. Mortal Kombat only made 84 million worldwide, while 2018’s Tomb Raider did better with 274 million worldwide. Sony’s Uncharted film in 2022 starring Tom Holland grossed over 400 million, which puts it right in line with the Sonic movies.

Outside of Mario, there’s actually not that many animated video game movies to compare with the live-action ones. There’s Angry Birds (2016), which grossed over 350 million worldwide, but little else.

Wreck-it-Ralph (2012), which is kind of like a Donkey Kong adaptation (but not really), grossed nearly 500 million dollars worldwide. The 2018 sequel did even better with 530 million dollars.

Okay, so with this limited data, it seems like animated video game movies do perform better than live-action video game movies. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, however, is doing most of the heavy lifting in this assumption.

Since both Zelda and Sonic are live-action, Sonic 4 may do okay against the new Zelda movie. After all, this is the fourth installment in a successful series that grosses more money each installment, with the third film being the highest-grossing live-action video game movie ever made. It wouldn’t be outrageous to assume the fourth Sonic movie will gross around 500 million dollars at the worldwide box office.

Zelda's Box Office Forecast

So…what will Zelda make at the box office?

You might assume Zelda will do better than Sonic because it’s more popular, but actually if you add up all the Sonic video game sales, they’ve sold 12 million more copies than the Zelda games. While we as Nintendo fans think Zelda is extremely popular, it’s not actually in the Top 10 best-selling video game franchises. Mario, however, is at the top, which likely accounts for its 1.3 billion result at the box office.

It also helps that Mario appeals to all ages, whereas Zelda tends to appeal to a slightly older audience. For that reason, as well as the fact it’s live-action, I don’t think Zelda will do as well as the Mario movie. However, if the film is great, there’s always the chance it could outperform due to word of mouth.

The Warcraft movie, a live-action adaptation of the popular Blizzard PC game, did relatively well with 439 million dollars at the worldwide box office. However, you’ll notice that since its 2016 release, the film never received a sequel. That’s because, while it is the fourth-best performing video game movie ever made, it still wasn’t enough to convince Blizzard that it was successful. They wanted to do Lord of the Rings (2002-2004) style numbers, and I assume Nintendo is trying to repeat the same success as Lord of the Rings as well. They’re even filming the Zelda movie in New Zealand.

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[Hedgie]

More likely Sonic 4 because:
1. The all ages thing will be making sure that the audience for the Sonic movies will continue to not only be adults.
2. Sonic 4 will likely get more of a female audience coming to watch it than the other Sonic movies did since the Sonic 3 movie's mid-credits scene confirmed that Amy Rose will be getting a theatrical introduction in the fourth movie.
3. The main reason why Sonic 3 didn't make more money at the theaters than it did make was because of how Disney selfishly rigged the theaters to make the screenings for Sonic 3 be more limited since they couldn't accept the fact that that videogame inspired movie was a more highly anticipated movie and would outgross their crappy Mufasa movie that no one asked for if they didn't do some greedy box office cheating! There isn't any Disney movies planned to be releasing around when Sonic 4 is currently planned to release so that problem is less likely to happen to Sonic 4.
Though Paramount should change that release date to avoid the competition. Plus they also need to stop with this Place Holder releases thing and let their future movies, (especially Sonic 4) get a worldwide release instead because of how the online spoilers that will be everywhere can ruin the hype for people in countries that won't have it releasing yet when other countries will have it releasing!
PS, some info from the people at Paramount has made it clear that that fourth Sonic movie will NOT be the last one. Producer Toby Ascher mentioned that there's more rich stories and that they don't feel like slowing down anytime soon and director Jeff Fowler said that as long as the fans keep asking for Sonic movies, they (Paramount) will keep making them.

[Splatubinator]

Definitely Sonic 4, aka Terminator 2 of The Sonic Cinematic Universe!