On the whole, people adore babies, like, instinctively. I don't get it either, at least on an intellectual level, but the ongoing existence of the human race is proof.
I do actually like that CG South Island but while nice, it's not going to redeem this film; moreso because as noted upthread it's likely to be in all of 5 minutes before we end up in live-action uncanny-valley land.
CG South Island? Sonic Mania music? Man, all these tiny little bites of optimism compared to how we all felt months and months ago. I wonder how many more nice surprises we'll see in the end?
Well this is a game series that took over the world in the 90's, starring famous 90's actor Jim Carrey, we might as well go all the way Honestly this whole movie project is like some strange relic of the 90's emerged in full force. It's beautiful.
https://twitter.com/Alpha3thegull/status/1211128121950441473?s=19 Old design baby Sonic plush and Sonic figure
I can't get over how that figure has been hastily retrofitted into a slightly hybrid design. No glove molding? Just paint the hands white! Make the eyes as big as possible! The redesign must be killing the merch licensees.
Well the original model had weird white hands, nothing was changed in that regard. But yea, this is likely a merchandising nightmare. Plus you get some models/adverts/whatever that feature a hybrid of sorts, with the newer Sonic proportions and the old Sonic's shoes.
A couple of weeks ago, some long range tracking for the film's domestic opening was predicted for the Sonic movie by Box Office Pro. $20 - $30 million, with a domestic total range topping out between $65 - $100 million. Remember, this is a $95 million film ($90M original budget + $5M reshoots). Advantages they listed for the film are older fans of the franchise checking out the movie (esp. if they are parents and they bring their kids), positive word-of-mouth online thanks to the movie redesign, and no family-targeted competition for the Valentine's Day holiday weekend and the following two weeks preceding Pixar's Onward. They did list however as a disadvantage the spotty track record of video game film adaptations at the box office, noting that it will ultimately fall towards reviews and word-of-mouth that will determine how the movie will perform. Personally speaking, I hope the the actual OW / final total gross falls short of those projections, if not completely miss them.
I really don't know what I want from the film. In an ideal world, this film wouldn't exist or would at least be drastically different and more akin to the series that's already exists for almost 30 years. But seeing as it does exist as a live-action, real-world, buddy-cop adaptation with an originally dreadful character redesign that was mostly fixed in the end (Jim Carrey is still an awful Robotnik)... I don't want to see it succeed. With any luck, the film will be forgotten and will just about break-even. I don't want the film to damage the series more than the past two decades of mostly rubbish games already has, but I also don't want it to continue as a brand. Whatever gets the movie over and done with fastest is best.
Ideally? Fall short of the cost it took to make, but not by a lot - just enough for it to quietly be forgotten and no sequals rather than the infamous mess it was looking to be before Tyson & co fixed the CG.
TBH I don't want the movie to fail. I'm just hoping it's decent. The second trailer made me think it's going to be OK, nothing spectacularly good or bad. But hey, so did Rambo: Last Blood, and we all know how that turned out. However, I don't want there to be sequels. This is not how I envisioned a Sonic movie. I envisioned a 2D animated film like the Sonic CD opening/closing cutscenes with a story that's emotional, dark, and thematically relevant in today's culture. I imagined a dystopia where Eggman conquered the world and a small community lived in the woods in fear. Sonic and Tails long for adventure and sneak out, Amy follows them and gets kidnapped, and they embark on an epic quest to rescue her that leads them to risking everything they've ever had and challenges everything they've ever known. But Paramount came to Sega and said "Hey, remember Hop? Let's do that, but with Sonic!" and now here we are.
Honestly I don't want it to fail, because 1.) it'd be another item on the massive list of failed Sonic experiments and I'm tired of that and 2.) it'll send Hollywood the wrong message, that even paying lip-service to viewer complaints leads to no success in the end, so fuck you plebs!!1! ...but I also don't want sequels.
I have a feeling that the international box office is going to save the movie, or at least help it to break even. But here's the thing about a potential sequel for this movie, is Jim Carrey going to comeback as Robotnik? He is famous for not doing sequels to his biggest franchises, with the exceptions to Ace Ventura and Dumb & Dumber. And in 2017 he did say this again: So the odds of him coming back are not too high.
To quote Dunkey: maybe for the sequel they’ll switch Jim Carrey with Steve Carell like they did with Evan Almighty
Speak of the devil. The Hollywood rumor mill has reported that Paramount is not only planning an entire trilogy, but also a Dr. Eggman spinoff. Courtesy of We Got This Covered. Assuming this is true: I can't say I'm surprised that the studio executives are now counting their chickens before they are even hatched. I've seen way too many examples of studios that churned out a poor film adaptation of a product and somehow lucked into making money off of it in spite of scathing reviews, and then believed they have a franchise on their hands. Ask how that went for The Flintstones (Viva Rock Vegas), Scooby-Doo (Monsters Unleashed), Garfield (A Tale of Two Kitties), Ghost Rider (Spirit of Vengeance), The Smurfs, TMNT (Out of the Shadows)...the list goes on and on. (And mark my words--Venom is next, especially so with how Sony's still trying to use that to springboard not just a Venom series, but an entire cinematic universe of Spider-Man characters from that as well.) Not everything can truly be critic-proof for a few entries like the Chipmunks, Transformers, and Resident Evil films; those are the exceptions to the general rule.
Take stuff from WGTC with a grain of salt. Anyone can write for the site, and they publish a lot of unverified rumors that end up being false.
