Paramount Pictures has released the first Sonic the Hedgehog 3 movie trailer, and just as we suspected, none other than Keanu Reeves himself has indeed been cast as antagonist Shadow the Hedgehog.
The trailer begins with James Marsden's Tom telling Sonic he's finally found his family, before we cut to the emergence of Shadow the Hedgehog from a testing facility. Team Sonic - that is, Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles - are enlisted to help defeat him.
It looks like the story is playing up the parallel between Sonic and Shadow; a voiceover tells us that Shadow's story began in much the same way as Sonic's, but where Sonic found friends and family, Shadow found "only pain and loss".
We only hear two spoken lines from Shadow. In his first, he describes Sonic and friends as a "colorful bunch", and in the second, he tells Sonic he did "what [he] had to", although naturally, the context for that exchange isn't clear yet.
Still, as if one of the trailer's hashtags didn't already make it explicit, the two lines are enough to make it abundantly clear that it's Keanu Reeves voicing the hedgehog.
As the trailer progresses, Sonic and his friends attempt to fight Shadow, but are obviously outmatched. They're forced to seek the help of none other than Jim Carrey's Dr. Robotnik, who's likely cooking up a plan of his own.
You can check out the trailer here, which features some fun audio callbacks based on Sonic's "Green Hill Zone" and Sonic Adventure 2's "Live and Learn", right here.
During the closing moments of the trailer, we also see Robotnik coming face to face with a figure who is presumably his grandfather Gerald, although we don't get to hear his name.
Sonic the Hedgehog 3 hits movie theaters on December 20th. We'll likely learn more about its narrative and cast in the intervening months, so stay tuned for more.
