Calling it, they've had an alternative version of Sonic ready for this and they're playing outrage marketing. There's no way at least that they're coming up with a new design from scratch. Six months to conceptualize, model, texture, rig... Yeah, that ain't happening. I hate that I'm cynical enough to think this way but I'm fairly certain that they stuck to the design to this point, so that they can do a 180 and generate some good will before the release.
First impressions really count, though. The general audience is ruthless, nobody's going to look back at a complete redesign and go "Oh, what a great effort"- they've already written this off as a failure and it's all they're going to remember 7 months from now. Project is tainted. "Sonic movie successfully salvaged from blatant incompetence" isn't a good plucky underdog narrative.
Arguably so and you could be right, but at the same time I don't think this necessarily negates the possibility. The people responsible for these sorts of decisions might just be really out-of-touch and genuinely thought it would work and while it's anecdotal, I can say that a couple of 'non-Sonic' friends (for lack of a better descriptor) who did enjoy the classics in the 90s have made Facebook posts about how they're relieved it's being changed so they've at least grabbed some people.
Yea and I wish I could share your optimism. But Occam's Razor suggests blatant incompetence, not sly marketing tactic.
Sonic looks like someone from Baywatch, he'd fit right in (come to think of it, when was the last time you thought about an animated Baywatch spin-off series?). They should have taken a cue from Sonic's world, instead of forcing him to adapt to the RL. Jim Carrey's Eggman looks awfully out of place and only works because of the badness of Sonic's character design. Why isn't he just playing a good guy? This really pisses me off...
Doug Walker reacting to the Sonic trailer - worth a watch (explaining how "beautifully bad" it looks)! [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI7XA5ye5zk[/youtube]
I think the best thing that's come from this are the fan edits. xD Still I'm hoping they are completely changing Sonic and not just making slight tweaks here and there. I still think this was a publicity stunt to get people talking about the movie, and quite frankly if that's the case then it worked. :v:
For two seconds I thought they featured the Eggman the Dictator in there. Also props for using a emu recording of the layering error of the Sonic title in your production ET.
The notion got in my head that this movie is actually a thinly veiled backdoor entry in the Ace Ventura series: The internet rarely disappoints.
Ok I just saw the Super Mario Bros movie and it's... amazingly good and bad at the same time. The transition between scenes doesn't make sense, there's a lot of laughs just from the amount of bad-good things like the koopas and just how ridiculous how you can have this anti-hero go into a supporting character within a minute of a scene. I actually enjoyed all 1 hour and 44 minutes of it. Now this movie may or may not be good. But I'm looking forward to it if it's the same type of bad as that movie.
It's been fun on reddit replying to all the folks thinking the director is going to completely redesign him. They have fundamental understanding on how marketing and revenue work on movies. Sorry its a hard to swallow pill, but they care more about making money than pleasing the fans. At the end of the day, their target audience are brainless kids that want to purchase toys and watch the movie 8 times a day.
I'm going to play Devil's advocate for a moment, because I like to consider both sides of an arguement, and a lot of the criticism I've seen on YouTube seems very quick to jump on the bandwagon... the movie walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, so it probably is one. But... Maybe Sonic isn't fast enough to miss the dart because he lacks the proper footwear, or requires some energy or ring energy to go fast, but in that moment he doesn't posses it. Maybe that's why at the end we see him so fast he seems to almost stop time. Maybe Carey doesn't look like Robotnik because he's in disguise, or maybe it's an origin story about Robotnik, which is a little similar to previous Robotnik stories where he is initially a military guy. It looks as though Robotnik ultimately follows Sonic back to his dimension, which would explain him as the lone human in the classic sonic-verse. As far as Carrey merely being Carrey, I think his portrayal was good in terms of being Robotnik before he descends into maddness. Maybe Sonic doesn't have a huge shoe collection, but instead a pile of destroyed shoes. It just seems like people dislike the design, so they are trying to trash everything else with zero context. It's just too early to tell on all the other fronts, all we know is the design isn't very good. The argument that the movie can't make any sense in the Sonic-verse is, as of yet, ill founded.
