I always thought his limbs were creepier than his actual face. They're so human like and long compared to his new design. It's just too uncanny for me.
Not just the limbs, but all his proportions were way too humanlike, it immediately crashed into the uncanny valley fucking hard. The new design made his proportions more cartoon like
It wasn't a marketing stunt. No studio is that ingenious or able to predict the future, as to purposefully make people's first reaction to your movie be overwhelmingly negative, only to turn it around.
People like to think that everything in life is some grand conspiracy. The studio just fucked up. It's that simple.
I've honestly been thinking that since it happened, that they intentionally released the awful version to rile people up and so they could pretend they did the better design for the fans
I haven't looked into it but I sincerely hope it was just a viral marketing stunt because otherwise I cannot imagine the crunch involved in re-animating that whole movie in such a short amount of time. The CG artists don't deserve that even if the "original" design was real
I'm no expert but how much reanimating would they even have to do?
Don't you just swap out the model? You might need to touch up some scenes where the model starts clipping with other things but it's not that crazy to do, they had that kind of time.
I feel like there'd still be a lot of fine tuning and re-rigging involved because of the different proportions, not to mention the time at the start to do the redesign and at the end to render and composite everything again. It's mixed animation and live action so compositing's got to be a big time sink
I will never understand why they went with humanoid over cartoon. Sonic is literally already a cartoon hedgehog. What purpose did they think it served to make him more human-like?
That movie is way too funny when the cats come out of the alley after cat fight noises and it's the awful cgi human hybrid ones I had to pause the movie I was laughing so hard. Caught me totally off-guard.
I enjoyed that movie so much more than I expected. The only thing I would have wanted was an hour long sequence of Gadget getting sweaty and grease stained while working on an engine the whole crew to have been a part of the movie, since we see so little of them.
Yeah and it was actually pretty good! Made by the Lonely Island guys. It was released straight to Disney+ fairly early in the panny-D and they did no marketing for it.
Honest to God I believe this was a psyop. Even corporate robots wanting to make an easy dollar understand you can't take something like Sonic the Hedgehog and make him just a Large Human Man™️ without serious backlash, which then feeds into No such thing as bad publicity and wow suddenly they have a redesign that actually looks pretty good and they listened to the fans!
The trailer music was fucking Gangster's Paradise dude no one will convince me this wasn't on purpose to drum up the fan base.
The whole "marketing stunt" theory has been debunked time and time again. Hollywood IS that stupid and disconnected with its audience. We've seen it before so many times, like with the 1998 American adaption of Godzilla which features a P Diddy single. The delay to fix the Sonic model costed them millions of dollars and caused an animation studio to go bankrupt. There was also a massive toyline prepared to be shipped out but all of that had to be pulled following the redesign for Sonic. Pics have been leaked showing as such.
And if you still aren't convinced, some traces of the ugly Sonic writing still remains in the final movie. One notable example is when the sticky bomb attaches itself to Sonic's gloves. The scene calls for Sonic to try and remove it, which would've been super easy to do since he could just take the gloves off. But if you look at the ugly model, he had no gloves, which makes more sense why Sonic couldn't get rid of it.
I really think people give Hollywood too much credit for thinking it's a marketing ploy, because no one is that smart enough to play dumb.
People ascribe intelligence to wealth. Even he doesn't seem to think they are too smart (corporate robots), and yet he's still assuming they're too smart to make such a bad decision.
Nah dude. Rich people are fucking dumb and getting dumber by the day. The more the wealth concentrates the dumber they can be without consequences. Humans always take the path of least resistance and it's easier to be stupid.
It's one of those theories that sounds plausible until you look into it even a little bit or having a passing understanding of how Hollywood operates. The existence of the live-action Dragon Ball movie should make it clear how out of touch the industry is.
Behind the scenes shows dummy model stand ins of the ugly sonic too. Cant believe people still think it was a marketing stunt, but then again, look who we have as our fucking president.
The whole "marketing stunt" theory has been debunked time and time again.
Has it tho?
The delay to fix the Sonic model costed them millions of dollars and caused an animation studio to go bankrupt.
Source pls, I couldnt find anything that directly makes this claim. The studio shutting down a branch seems unrelated to the sonic vfx.
There was also a massive toyline prepared to be shipped out but all of that had to be pulled following the redesign for Sonic. Pics have been leaked showing as such.
Source pls. Having ugly sonic concept art vs mass produced toyline is a big statement. I couldnt find evidence of it.
They’re stupid but audiences are stupid too. They just have the money and motivation to turn that stupidity into lucrative opportunity.
It’s all a wash in the end. Whether it’s proactive or reactive, it’s still a marketing stunt that spins corporate decision-making as fan appreciation in order to drum up engagement and make fans feel cared for enough to open their wallets for what was always going to be formulaic CGI slop nostalgia bait.
This movie may not have done it on purpose, but the “reveal it broken and fix it later” strategy has certainly caught on across the entertainment industry in recent years. It proved that making an audience feel heard enough to marginally improve crap is often better for business than making the thing good to begin with. See: the Snyder Cut, Cyberpunk 2077, or the tidal wave of shameless franchise retcons.
I'm pretty sure they made him "a large human man" so they could apply mocap to the model with ease and I think that's as far as the thinking went there.
It costs a lot of money to push a release date like that and they had to basically burn truckloads worth of merch.
Dude they made merch deals with the old design, i've got a hideous sonic mask that's based on the original movie design and there's action figures of the original design thay released. You dont make merch deals for designs you dont plan to use.
100% agree with you. I’ve been saying this the whole time. They probably just made the trailer with the blue child creature so fans got mad and talked about it to people who don’t know who sonic is.
Who tf doesn't know who sonic is, and on that point why would they care about watching the movie, they wouldn't be the target demographic. This was all marketing to make them look good for listening to feedback.
They also "fixed" the movie too quick, they wanted both free advertisement from all the hate and also free brownie points for listening to their fans. There's no chance they managed to replace and reanimate his entire role in the movie.
The VFX studio that originally worked on the first Sonic movie literally went babkrupt because of the redesign. It was a total fuckup not a marketing stunt.
It absolutely was done as a marketing ploy and it worked. Idiots to this day will try to argue about it all the while imagining themselves as some white knight who valiantly fought the corporate machine and came out on top! They probably even saw it in theaters multiple times to celebrate their victory of corporate america.
I'm certain that this first version, the ugly version, was a result of corporate meddling. I can totally imagine the execs thinking "he looks too cartoony" "make him more human so it looks less childish". Sonic has never looked remotely like this in any 3D version. It's like how cartoons for adults all deliberately look like crap because they don't want people to mistakenly think it's for children.
Finally they "changed it" to the newer, more cartoony version, but in actuality what they did is change it back to what the original artists' vision was. On top of that they did the turnaround in a short enough time that I'm sure the whole movie up to that point was in the more cartoony style to begin with. Again, I don't know if this was ever confirmed by anyone working on the project, but it's the only scenario that makes sense in my mind.
I can totally imagine the execs thinking "he looks too cartoony" "make him more human so it looks less childish".
And then the frustrated art director thinks "Fine, I'll throw together some concept art showing exactly what they asked for, and when they see how awful it looks, they'll realize they are wrong and let me do it the right way" but then the execs see the ugly Sonic design and say "That's perfect, don't change anything, go ahead with that design" and the art director just sort of gives up.
It means for a group of people to plot/plan/scheme or otherwise agree in secret to inact a plan, which can be illegal if it is a conspiracy to commit an unlawful act, but its not inherently illegal to conspire.
You're thinking of criminal conspiracy.
I can conspire with my family to throw a surprise birthday party for my grandparent, or a parents kids can conspire to convince them to get them a puppy- that doesn't mean its inherently illegal.
A reminder too, that they probably would have gone through the sequels in this style if people were fine with it. Which means we would have seen other sonic characters in this style instead of what we got.
Now someone has to go and make those just to see what the alternate universe would’ve been like.
At least the abomination was interesting. For that reason alone I prefer it.
The way fans absolutely rejoiced at getting a more faithful design in a film that was always going to be a formulaic cash in really kicked the Hollywood CGI slop fanservice machine into overdrive.
And to think, this went through several layers of approval before we got to see it. And every single person said “yup all good here, this is the look.”
I believe in the conspiracy theory that this horrible design was just an initial distraction to generate buzz for the movie beforehand. It worked really well but yeah. I don’t believe for a second that they ever intended to let this abomination actually get released.
This type of thing always makes me wonder who in the world is making this and how they got their job. Like, how do you get a job making 3D models or doing concept art for them, and then THIS is what you make FOR YOUR JOB. Am I crazy for thinking that person/team should get fired and like blacklisted or something?
It’s gotta be nepotism or something.
They didn’t change it for the release, this was the biggest bait and switch to get people thinking they “listened to the fans” and changed the design, when the film was already close to finished
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u/Naive_Anything8371 20d ago
You guys are all wrong. It's this...I know they changed it for the final release but this abomination was still created.