The producer of the Sonic the Hedgehog films, Neal Moritz, breaks down the decision to redesign Sonic following the overwhelmingly negative response to the first movie's initial trailer. The backlash to the trailer was so intense that Paramount agreed to delay the film several months to fix the problem and satisfy fans. Director Jeff Fowler pushed his entire VFX team to redesign the character to more closely resemble his video game appearance.
Neither of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies have earned stellar scores from critics - the first film has a 63% score on Rotten Tomatoes, while Sonic 2 sits at 66%. However, the audience's excitement for the property reached an all-time high this year, with Sonic the Hedgehog 2’s box office breaking the record for a video game movie's opening weekend gross. While the movies differ in some ways from Sonic video game canon, they offer heartfelt homages to their source material, unlike most other video game adaptations.
Now, Moritz, who also produces other franchises such as Goosebumps and Fast & Furious, explains how the movie's unprecedented redesign came about while on The Town with Matthew Belloni podcast. While the Sonic the Hedgehog trailer backlash was significant, the “huge interest” showed the filmmakers they could have a hit on their hands, if they addressed fan complaints. Moritz details the meeting with Paramount and SEGA executives, saying the studio was “very supportive” of his and Fowler’s decision to redesign the character. Check out a quote from Moritz below:
I remember it like it was yesterday... Here's what we learned: we learned that we had more views and more interest in something than we ever thought could possibly exist. The problem was... all the response was negative about the character. But, we were like, 'Holy crap, people love and are really... If we can turn this ship around, we already know we got huge interest.' So, we had an all-hands-on-deck meeting the next morning in one of the board rooms at Paramount... and we said, 'We are going to take the character back to what that is loved, and we need x-amount of dollars to do this, and we need to delay the movie.' And I have to say, SEGA and Paramount said, 'Okay, you're right...' And we just decided we were going to make it right... [W]e ultimately did not want to let the fans down, Paramount down, or SEGA down, who had given us their crown jewel to go make a movie of… We put everything into it to make it right, and we listened.
Paramount’s swift response to the fan outcry, as well as their poster campaign mimicking the covers of early Sonic games, shows a real willingness from the studio to listen and respond to viewers' criticism. This is something that many other studios, when adapting video games, can’t seem to grasp. Though it fared well at the box office, a recent adaptation of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted received intense criticism from the game’s fans for casting a young Nathan Drake, and for its deviation from the source material. However, Paramount’s dedication to Sonic’s hard-core fanbase is impressive, and something other studios should aspire to.
The new design for Sonic was embraced by fans, so ultimately, Moritz, Fowler, and Paramount made the right decision in adjusting the design. With Sonic 2 now feasting at the box office, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 has already been officially greenlit, along with a spinoff for Idris Elba’s Knuckles. In other words the future of the Sonic films, thanks to Paramount’s commitment to the fanbase, is sure to be bright.
Source: The Town with Matthew Belloni