While I doubt it will be horrifyingly bad, I also doubt it will approach good, either. We've all been burned by both this franchise and video game movies too many times or me to risk my time and money. I'll wait for Redbox.
I want to know the logistics behind SEGA being able and willing to afford it for Sonic Mania, but Paramount can't or won't for the Movie.
One can assume Nakamura asked for extra money for it to be in the movie and Paramount balked at the asking price, but there might be some other hang ups as well if legalities are involved.
Yeah, some of y'all are really black-and-white with your opinions. The movie won't be any sort of magnum opus, but at the same time it doesn't look god-awful. It looks like it'll be a simple kids' movie that most people will have forgotten about in a year or two. My 10-year-old nephew was really excited to see the movie pre-redesign and delay, he hasn't mentioned the movie lately but I'm sure he'd still be happy to see it now. I initially wasn't planning on seeing it myself, but this girl I've been hanging out with has a six-year-old kid that's a big Sonic fan; he has Sonic pajamas, he turned a Thanksgiving turkey for a school project into Sonic, etc. I figure if she's up for sitting through a kids' movie then I can take her and her kid to it sometime in the days following the premiere. I'm sure the little dude will enjoy the film, and it looks inoffensive enough that I won't hate it.
I'm seeing it with my partner. The flipside is that I also have to watch the live-action Mulan, in which I am not even slightly interested :|
Speak for yourself; I do think that this film looks God-awful. From the annoying characters to the uninteresting plot to absolutely terrible attempts at humour, I don't think I could stomach even half an hour of this movie. The CG effects looks pretty rough in all of the post-redesign footage, with Sonic looking like a CG character slapped into the real world. I'm willing to give that one the benefit of the doubt until the movie is actually out, but so far the lighting just looks totally off and he's not believable part of the scenes. The old design was the outrageously bad and needed to go, but in the first trailer I don't think that Sonic looked as out of place. It could just be because of the newer footage being more of a rushed WIP, so it gets the benefit of the doubt like I said. Is it going to go down in the history books as one of the worst films ever made? Probably not. And it's pretty marketable to kids, which is more than can be said for a number of video game films. But seriously, it doesn't look good by any standards.
I feel the same way from what I've seen so far. It should at least be fun for kids, so I'll probably go see it with my 5-year-old son.
It mentions Nakamura will still be credited for Green Hill on the soundtrack, does that mean they're still using the song in the movie? Maybe just not as much as Junkie XL wanted to? I hope it pulls more from the games' OST than Detective Pikachu did, which IIRC didn't feature anything until the credits. The anime theme song showed up a few times, but that was it.
The redesign trailer had a remix of Green Hill Zone during the baseball scene, so I imagine it will show up somewhere in the movie.
If they don't use Flight of the Bumblebee and In the Hall of the Mountain King, I'm asking for my ticket money back.
Planning to go see it with my friends on release day. I'm hoping its terrible enough to laugh at, otherwise I'll be pretty bored and regret asking them to come with me. I have no expectations it will be 'good'. Here's hoping they release the original in the future as a DVD extra. I wonder if they will have it post-credits scene as a joke.
From what I’ve seen some VFX artists say about the general filmmaking process, it seems unlikely they finished much more with the old design than what was included in the original trailer. They cut together that footage first and then do the CGI work on it to make it presentable. There was a trailer for Ted 2 that leaked before any of the CGI was done and looked amazing, it was just a static picture of Ted with PLACEHOLDER written on him whenever he appeared, but otherwise all the other footage was the same as what eventually released. CGI generally seems to be one of the last things that’s done for a movie. Paramount seems to want to sweep the old design under the rug but I wouldn’t be surprised if the DVD contains the original trailer or something. There will probably never be a “hideous Sonic” cut of the movie though.
There's a full unfinished cut of X-Men Origins: Wolverine out there that has basically no/unfinished CG effects, which is also pretty amazing. An "original Sonic" cut of the movie won't happen without significant effort. They'd basically have to redo everything all over again, and the original VFX studio is shuttered...
I'm going to see it with my girlfriend on opening night, because what better way is there to spend Valentine's Day with your significant other than going to watch a mediocre kid's movie? It's probably going to fine. A fun 90 minutes at best, inoffensive at worst. If it ends up not doing well, it'll probably never be acknowledged again, so that's a plus.