Sega and Paramount release a joint statement that the film is now destined for theaters November 15, 2019. It’s a shaky bet given the box-office track record of such video-game-adapted super flops as Super Mario Bros., Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. And Fowler, a 2005 Best Short Film Oscar nominee for writing and directing the anthropomorphic animal romp Gopher Broke, is installed as director.Īfter Sony puts the film in “turnaround” (Hollywood jargon for when a studio decides not to pour any more money into a project and accepts a tax loss), Paramount swoops in to acquire Sonic’s distribution rights as part of its new first-look deal with Moritz. Sega chief executive Hajime Satomi reveals the adaptation will hit theaters in 2018.ĭeadpool director Tim Miller boards the family-friendly project - which will reportedly follow Sonic and “friends such as Tails and Knuckles, who run around collecting items and points as they attempt to foil the global domination plans of Doctor Eggman Robotnik” - as executive producer.
With Sonic having sold 140 million games and grossed more than $1 billion by that point, the studio lays out its objective to “capture everything that fans know and love” about the character while also “growing his audience wider than ever before.” Sony and Fast and Furious franchise producer Neal Moritz announce they will team with Sega subsidiary Marza Animation Planet to mount a computer-animated/live-action hybrid of the Japanese video-game giant’s second-most iconic - read: non-Mario - intellectual property. adaptation of the Pokémon spinoff Detective Pikachu didn’t? And how did Paramount go about reconsidering its character’s conspicuous imperfections? In keeping with a kind of FX omerta that surrounds this kind of emergency post-production overhaul, Hollywood’s major effects studios Digital Domain (which worked on “previz” for Sonic), Industrial Light & Magic, and Weta Workshop also declined our interview requests (with ILM specifically refusing to “speculate or compare productions”).Īs the spiny speed demon blasts toward a box-office debut that prerelease tracking estimates predict will fall in the $41–47 million range domestically - respectable numbers for a PG-13 film with a reported $95 million production budget - here is a timeline of the intention, dysfunction, and dental downsizing that brought Sonic to the brink of oblivion and back. So where did Sonic go wrong in so many of the ways that last year’s Warner Bros. Photo: Paramount Pictures and Sega of America New and improved Sonic, less prominent teeth and all. (Paramount declined to make Fowler or any of the movie’s effects experts available to speak with Vulture.)
“It was pretty clear on the day the trailer was released, just seeing the feedback and hearing the feedback, that fans were not happy where we were at,” Sonic director Jeff Fowler said in an interview this week with GamesRadar+. To wit: When it came to Sonic, Paramount took drastic measures to redress audience expectations, pushing the film’s release back by nearly a year and giving the go-ahead to an expensive, soup-to-nuts retrofitting of the character’s biodynamics in a bid to silence those who saw the trailer as a “ 200 mph slap in the face.” And singled out for most withering critique: that the blue blur’s teeth were “too big” and “terrifyingly human.”Īs evidenced by recent pushback against Cats’ Uncanny Valley–straining VFX extremes and the de-aging technology that failed to mask the old-man ricketiness of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in The Irishman, hell hath no fury like a fan displeased with a movie’s visual effects. Among the cris de coeur against the CGI Sega character: that Sonic was “creepy” and “upsetting,” that his eyes were too un-conjoined, his features too dissimilar to those of his video-game counterpart. Upon the film’s first trailer drop in April, online outcry toward Paramount Pictures’ live-action adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog was immediate and unequivocal - nearly uniform in its meme-ified damnation. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Paramount Pictures A complete timeline of the Sega character’s return to the big screen, from dental horror to emergency redesign to today.
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