Nestor

I'm not sure I entirely agree - you had suggested that Sonic would be significantly different with totally different body proportions and used a modified version of the Studio Blur fanfilm as an example, however the writer was asked whether it would be identical to the games or "will Sonic look weird and freaky like in that fan film" and replied that neither would be the case, and that the design would be "still Sonic but a little more realistic" (emphasis mine). That means that whatever the new design is, it is less extreme than the 'weird and freaky' Studio Blur design, and only a little more realistic than the games, essentially a halfway house between game Sonic and Studio Blur Sonic; some of what you've suggested is rather more extreme than that, and this seems to confirm that such a drastic redesign will not be the case. I suspect that a 'little more realistic' will be a more textured surface, greater detail, and perhaps very slightly lengthened proportions (as you said, like classic to modern Sonic), rather than an extensive redesign.

Well that's something at least, all though I do worry how they're going to portray him... At minimum, even if they were to stay close to his game look, I expect him to be more realistically textured and have some mild accesory variations (like his Sonic Boom incarnation). However, if your guess is right and they go the whole hog in the redesign.... well, anything's possible frankly. This is the same franchise that brought us the Werehog, thought a fishing simulator was a sensible addition to a fast paced action game, and had a romantic scene involving a heroine kissing a dead hedgehog. At this point, if they'd said that the Sonic film was going to be a musical set against the backdrop of Bolshevik Russia, I wouldn't have been surprised.

Good grief. Between that, the complete lack of reference to Eggman or any of the other cast, and the fact that out of all of the incredible vistas and set-pieces that the franchise has to offer, they chose Nowheresville, US as the movie location, my optimism for this movie is not super high. I wait to be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath.

I keep seeing references in this discussion to the fact that the Sonic movie's going to be a PG-13.... but is it really? Has this actually been confirmed? Because 'action adventure' doesn't automatically mean that it has to be PG-13 nor serious, you can quite happily have light-hearted PG rated action adventures. The idea of a 'serious' realistic Sonic with possible profanity fills me with dread.

That’s not entirely accurate; firstly, the fact that the first film was financially successful is slightly misleading as it's TMNT - the franchise has enough momentum that they could have shot it in claymation and the first movie would still have been a box office smash. The audience reviews may have started high, but it was panned by the critics and the rotten tomatoes audience currently has it at 51%. Similarly, I don't think it was just the ‘hardcore’ fans that reacted with... mixed feelings towards the redesign, it was somewhat prevalent all over the internet and generated a goodly number of memes. I don't think that's necessarily the case, nor is the story of the Sonic movie as revealed so far particularly serious; the original Pete's Dragon contained essentially a similar plot from its villain, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? had a much darker storyline despite much goofier toons. The key here is the framing to allow suspension of disbelief present - if Sonic is supposed to be a mutant or something, I agree his game design would be too cartoony, but if he is a creature from a different dimension, then a weirder design is easier to swallow. Still not ideal, mind you - having the live action and CGI in the first place was a bad idea for something like Sonic - but I don't think people would react as badly to his game design as you suggest. ....Why? A creature from another dimension isn't necessarily going to share our dimension’s norms, that's.... kind of the whole point. Reams of fiction, serious and otherwise, has been written about entities from elsewhere that break the laws of our universe; the fact that they are supposed to be explicitly from outside our plane of reality is what gives them a modicum of suspension of disbelief. That's not an entirely fair example - that's a poorly photoshopped Sonic placed randomly without any ambient lighting; actual film level CGI would look superior and more detailed. However, you are right in that without any framing or context, Sonic does look strange in a real life environment, and could draw some mirth... but the problem is, so do the redesigns. Sure, realistic-ish fur may look slightly better, but imagine putting your picture, your Bluecore improvement or the re-proportioned Sonic in that picture instead. Would they look right next to the humans? Or would they still look like a cartoony mascot suit, a furry convention goer or an escapee from Monsters Inc? This is the problem with redesigning Sonic; while something like Alvin and the Chipmunks can be made to a realistic approximation relatively easily, Sonic is so stylised that anything less than a complete redesign looks... a bit strange at best and unsettling at worst. Take your realistic Sonic picture; you're obviously a skilled artist and the picture is done to a high quality, with significant detail - it succeeds in realising a more realistically styled Sonic. However, due to Sonic's over stylised nature, that realisation does fall into a rather uncanny valley area, where its not entirely toony and not entirely realistic, with the end result of Sonic looking.... less appealing than his standard design, while still being out of place in the real world. That isn't due to your skills as an artist, it's just the natural end result of trying to draw a character like Sonic in a realistic fashion. I fear that a 'realistic' Sonic would fall into the same pitfalls of his regular design - looking strange next to real environments - while also falling prey to the negative feedback and joke memes that such a drastic redesign would inevitably lead to. The only other option of course would be to radically redesign him from the ground up to look realistic, abandoning almost all his game look, but I suspect that would end in something like the live action Mario movie, where it bears almost no resemblance to the franchise it's based upon. .... Of course, that doesn't mean that SEGA and the filmakers won't actually decide to do any of these things, they've made some.... unusual choices with this film already....

The problem is though, if they use an uncanny valley, totally redesigned Sonic then the movie will still be laughed out of theatres - compare the reaction to the original TMNT movies (where they stuck fairly closely to the cartoon versions) with the overwhelmingly negative reaction the most recent TMNT movies got with their ugly CGI Turtles. The issue with making 'realistic' versions of Sonic is the same - they just look a bit creepy and wouldn't play well to a casual audience. See, that story - Sonic being a strange creature from another dimension - would allow for a regular looking Sonic to appear without harming suspension of disbelief. After all, the actual games themselves have him co-existing with semi-realistic humans, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch.

My main worry is that they 'reinvent' Dr Eggman similar to how Bowser was butchered in the Mario movie to the point that he's essentially a completely different character. As Eggman is often one of the highlights of these sort of things, that would pretty much sink the movie... unless they actually managed to make an effective and compelling alt-Eggman (like, for example, the SatAM Robotnik who was significantly different to Eggman but an effective character in his own right and fit within the show's context).

Well, I always wanted SEGA to base a movie loosely on one of the games... ...I just hadn't expected them to pick Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car as their focus.

My understanding was that Biolizard is only the prototype Ultimate Life Form of Project Shadow - the completed version, finished using Black Doom's DNA and later given an implanted mission in his memory, is Shadow the Hedgehog. While Shadow's goal was to collect the Chaos Emeralds and thus start the colony drop endgame, Biolizard appears to simply be the last line of defense for the Eclipse Cannon's core; Gerald seems to have programmed him as a failsafe to keep the plan going once begun. Correspondingly, Eggman makes android copies of Shadow rather than Biolizard as Shadow is the final version of the ULF, as well as the fact that Shadow is a significantly more useful template than Biolizard (Shadow is fast, agile, deadly and a match to Sonic, while Biolizard - though possessing some dangerous abilities of its own - is a near immobile lump of flesh and metal). On top of that, Eggman actually had Shadow in captivity to copy.

Sonic Heroes, possibly? There were very few dark moments and it was all fairly bouncy and cheesy (admittedly in part due to its minimalist plot). Sonic Colors was also fairly lighthearted, with its constant joking, although the whole 'imprisoning cute aliens in a hellish underground volcanic facility to be fed like cattle into a machine to suck out their essence and turn them into mindless animalistic versions of themselves' angle pushes it up a darkness notch. Generations too - probably the darkest thing in that was Time Eater and even it turned out to be an Eggman manipulation.

Heck, in the next game he was seconds away from destroying the entire United Federation with the Eclipse Cannon! I don't know... he might not have done much maniacal laughter, but he had an awful lot of evil gloating moments which were pretty classic Eggman, particularly his final mech speech. I'd argue that Eggman's threat in Forces came from a combination of Infinite's powers and the fact that he now has a whole empire behind him; he does also have the whole 'in 3 days I win!' mystery threat in the background, with the whole sun melting thing a way to take out the resistance in one fell stroke without destroying the world (as the illusion would only affect living creatures and things that can think, like Omega). While it definitely could have been written and implemented significantly better, the Resistance does have quite a tough time gradually beating him back in increments.

Do these sales numbers include online purchases?

I'm actually going to disagree a little with the OP - while I think that you're right that Eggman should be goofy rather than serious, he even in his classic incarnation was clearly trying to kill Sonic during the games, with obviously lethal traps and robots. Even in Mania Adventures, Eggman tries to kill Sonic - his little pocket pad that falls out shows his goal as a cartoony dead Sonic with X eyes and flies buzzing around him. Furthermore, while his schemes were zany, they still often involved potentially lethal collateral damage - just look at the Death Egg, which despite being goofy, was ultimately designed to cause a 'global catastrophe' so that he could rule the world. I think you can have a goofy villain who's still evil and a mortal threat to the protagonist - the obvious example would be Wile E Coyote, who despite his comedic schemes, ultimately does aim to eat the Road Runner. Sonic is always relatively chilled when facing Eggman as it's in his nature and he is always confident in his ability to stop him; he'd never 'permanently' take care of Eggman due to his personal morality, anymore than Batman would kill the Joker despite the potential threat he poses. The situation is muddied somewhat due to the cartoony setting meaning that characters often survive things they shouldn't, but if Eggman is no longer a dangerous foe on some level, it diminishes his effectiveness as an antagonist. I'd argue that any portrayal of Eggman needs both goofiness and danger to him - a lack of either takes him out of character.

Perhaps the Battle Kukku were made up of multiple different sub-species? That said, they did have a crazy scientist on board....

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but something unusual I just noticed about the mystery villain....