'Sonic The Hedgehog' has the biggest video game movie opening ever

Sonic The Hedgehog hauled in a stunning $100 million (around £76 million) worldwide this weekend.

That makes it the biggest ever opening weekend for a movie based on a video game, making $68 million (£52 million) in the US alone.

That means it's pummelled previous champ, Detective Pikachu, which made an impressive-at-the-time $54.3 million last year.

Read more: How Sonic overcame its design controversy

It's the biggest opening weekend for the Paramount studio since Mission: Impossible – Fallout in 2018, and has hammered Terminator: Dark Fate's $29 million.

This is a pretty stunning turnaround for a movie which, on releasing the first look at the CGI rendering of the console mammal, was hounded out of town.

Movie fans were appalled at Sonic's tiny eyes and strange human teeth, while one critic called the design 'a blight upon this weary earth'.

Taking heed of the universal criticism, director Jeff Fowler went back to the drawing board and made Sonic more akin to the one we know and love from the long-running Sega series.

The production was postponed by three months while the changes were implemented, meaning that the movie's budget hit $87 million, but fears have now likely been eased by the movie's impressive performance so far.

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Reviews of the movie have also been relatively kind too, if not wholly celebratory.

It finds Parks and Recreation star Ben Schwartz voicing Sonic, with Westworld’s James Marsden as the small town Sheriff who befriends the supersonic hedgehog and teams up to help him defeat evil scientist Dr. Ivo Robotnik, played to the hilt by Jim Carrey.

The movie even hints at a sequel, with Sonic's old chum Miles 'Tails' Prower, the two-tailed fox, turning up in a mid-credits sequence.