Second Sonic the Hedgehog trailer shows fixed design

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/12/second-sonic-the-hedgehog-trai.html

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I could not care less about this film or the rabid backlash against the first design, but… that looks a whole lot better, actually.

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Finally, less of an abomination than reanimated James Dean

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They should have gone with an 8x8 pixel format.

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" Second Sonic the Hedgehog trailer shows fixed design, completely mediocre hollywood family film plot and aesthetics"

Also he still has stylised spines made of hair which still makes no sense

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They should have have given Paul Robertson a hollywood feature budget to make a Megadrive–hardware-accurate 16 bit Sonic movie

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Huge improvement that just makes even more clear how bizarrely misguided the original design was and how justified the backlash was. Sonic’s an extremely well-known and recognizable character that’s been done in 3D for, what, 20 years? To invent a weird new extremely unattractive design for his first movie made zero sense.

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The first design was 100% a publicity stunt, and it sure the hell worked.

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I’m going to be optimistic and assume sarcasm.

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Nothing about the source material makes any sense either so that part is totally on-brand.

A bigger question is “has anyone ever made a good live-action adaptation of a video game?” I didn’t see those Tomb Raider movies but I certainly wasn’t impressed by Mario Brothers or Mortal Kombat.

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So, they circulated some unfinished shots, got feedback on which parts the test audience liked and which parts they didn’t, and then made the suggested changes to the product for maximum appeal.

Hollywood has been employing focus groups for this purpose since the dawn of cinema. Video games have beta testers. On Broadway, they call it “workshops” or “previews” but the principle is the same.

Only now, when digital production enables much faster revisions, it is evidently possible to use the entire intended audience for focus group testing. You don’t even have to feed or pay the test subjects, just pretend to swallow some humble pie as you release the revisions.

I think we will be seeing a whole lot more of this method in times to come.

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If they’d just ‘leaked’ or posted some clips/shots, I would be more inclined to buy into the “publicity stunt/focus group” conspiracy theory that’s popular amongst social media, but putting out a full, complete, polished trailer in theaters isn’t a way to ‘circulate unfinished shots’. The revisions for this film ended up altering the studio’s entire release schedule and hugely increased the film’s overall budget. That’s not test-marketing, that’s misjudging and poorly-designing a character and then rush-fixing it.

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I wonder if the issue escalated to Jim Carrey’s attention and he threatened to pull out unless they fixed it. There are probably only a handful of people on the project that could force it to go over budget + over schedule after that trailer was released.

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SMB Movie is the best bad but good film next to Gremlins 2. >:3

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I’d probably pay to watch a movie that was 100% Genesis-quality graphics of Sonic doing ridiculous fast loops and jumps.

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This is 100x better. I am going to say that I feel this might have been a PR stunt. And if so, it worked.

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I believe the first tomb raider movie and the first couple(?) Resident Evil movies are well regarded. I don’t imagine the former’s aged well but the latter still gets passed around for the cheese factor.

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So did the Ramones regret ever making blitzkrieg bop?

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I don’t think so. No one delays a family friendly movie from November/December into February as a publicity stunt.

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Still has two eyes… Is it really that hard ?!

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