Sonic Live Action Movie Thread (Read OP for topic rules) "Trailer 2 on Page 482)

[Red Hot Jack]

2 minutes ago, JosepHenry said:

Is so weird. This dude who saw it says that his face was cartoony as the original but with realistic textured fur like... What?

This is the reason why I'm still giving them the benefit of doubt for now, but if I don't like it, what can I do?  They already got the proportions wrong, apparently the eyes are also different. It just looks ugly. Also, why does it look better in every fan art we've seen?

[Razule]

13 minutes ago, JosepHenry said:

Is so weird. This dude who saw it says that his face was cartoony as the original but with realistic textured fur like... What?

Maybe he meant it's cartoony like the original, but not.. the same as the original? As in, Goku and Sonic are both cartoony because they're both cartoons, but they don't look the same?

Like.. the live action Chipmunks are cartoony and the cartoon Chipmunks are cartoony but in their own ways??

[PeterPancake]

He meant that he has the classic eyes and muzzle from the games. The guy on Reddit who did In fact see the teaser, said the face looked very traditional just with split eyes and a furry muzzle 

[Razule]

6 minutes ago, I Love Sticks said:

This is the reason why I'm still giving them the benefit of doubt for now, but if I don't like it, what can I do?  They already got the proportions wrong, apparently the eyes are also different. It just looks ugly. Also, why does it look better in every fan art we've seen?

Because of course 2D art based off it is going to look better (and closer to the original) than the realistic CGI render.

Even if you don't like the realistic Pokemon, if you draw Detective Pikachu without going into the details you're just going to get a fluffy classic Pikachu with a hat.

[Sonic Fan J]

3 minutes ago, Sega DogTagz said:

More like they arn't 1000% attached at the hip to the current design and are more willing and open to change/reinterpretation.

Our fandom goes to pieces over green eyes and blue arms. The negativity that exist here wouldn't automatically be present in a public setting.

It's more like what @PeterPancake says; the average non fan just doesn't care about the details. As long as the most superficial elements are there that they recognize as Sonic then it is Sonic to them. Of course my personal opinion is that lack of caring about the details is part of what is severely wrong with our world on a whole but that's not an appropriate topic for these forums.

3 minutes ago, PeterPancake said:

The reality, Sonic still looks like that. The silhouette is not that different. What seems difficult for people to understand is that the general design of Sonic is RECOGNIZABLE to the general audience and they do not care about much less notice how thick his limbs are in comparison to the games.  The design/ingredients of it are not/nowhere near the level of Michael Bayturtles. So when somebody who is not a huge fan of Sonic sees this:

 

 

And this

 

 

There is NOT going to be a huge difference between the two in their eyes. All it is to them is a realistic Sonic. So  questioning their credibility in relation to how accurate that picture is to what we got is the wrong way to approach this whole thing. 

 

However, if Sonic had beady black eyes and a completely different face, they would have noticed it. But the general details of the body are not that important to them

 

As I say above in this post I pretty much agree with you about the general audience, but there is a huge difference to Sonic fans who do care about the details. Superficial similarities are not enough for them if what is changed they find offensive. As a result they question the validity of the words of those who don't care, because if superficial similarities is enough for them how can they expect an accurate comparison or representation. It's kind of like if an expert on grass was asking you to describe what species of grass you were looking at and you just told them it was green and grass so it must be grass. It's a gross misrepresentation of what is being asked for destroys trust. It's an unfortunate side effect in this case but I hope this makes it easier for you to understand where the trust problem is coming from. We may not be experts to be sure, but we are obsessive and that has to count for something in this case, good or bad.

[Red Hot Jack]

Some unrelated good news:

We still have a surprise coming

[DabigRG]

On 12/10/2018 at 8:19 AM, Blue Blood said:

Exactly as horrible as any Sonic fan would expect.

What the foooooq...nooohooo.....

Why does he look like that boy from Jumanji mid-transformation?

And did we really need to add the lightning for such an iconic character in their own right?

On 12/10/2018 at 8:47 AM, Blue Knight/Bluestreak said:

Okay the part that they mention won't be on Earth, sounds to me how the film will start. And that the non-Earth segments could be all CGI and Sonic may have a different appearance on Earth than he did in His World (joke intended).

 

What does that remind me of?

On 12/10/2018 at 8:52 AM, Blue Knight/Bluestreak said:

But if his face and eyes are better than we think. Than at least keep whiskers off of him. They did that with Sly Cooper and I didn't care for it.

Yes, please.

[ShadowSJG]

So is the face real/likely?

But this is coming out at such a bad time, people will compare to detective pikachu and make it look bad

[Razule]

3 minutes ago, I Love Sticks said:

Some unrelated good news:

We still have a surprise coming

Teaser for a 2019 Sonic Team game? That "secret" Mania cartoon?

[Diogenes]

3 minutes ago, Razule said:

Teaser for a 2019 Sonic Team game? That "secret" Mania cartoon?

It's a tiny gift. I'd set your sights lower. Much lower.

[Rabid-Coot]

Looking at the money earned rankings for animation and family - talking animal I'm surprised they're trying the live action route. It seems way easier to make money on a pure cartoon.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=animation.htm

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=talkinganimal.htm

[DabigRG]

On 12/10/2018 at 8:58 AM, Indigo Rush said:

If you're a Sonic fan, you're not going anywhere. Sit right back down. You don't get to evacuate. What makes you think THIS is the last straw?

You picked this guild, you're contractually obligated to see this flick with the rest of us. You knew exactly how this was going to go. Shut up, put on your Sonic hats and buy a tub of popcorn and a bottle of Jack Daniels. It's a new era.

 

 

On 12/10/2018 at 8:58 AM, Zeer said:

Yeah, I'm not liking what I'm seeing at all. It feels like it's a edgy joke mockup poster for a Sonic movie you'd see online, not an official one.

Almost dead on.

Edited December 12, 2018 by Kiah

[Jango]

Guys, guys, they're obviously saving the gloves for the sequel.

[Razule]

2 minutes ago, DabigRG said:

What does that remind me of?

Jimmy/Timmy Power Hour, Fat Albert, Sponge Out of Water..

3 minutes ago, Rabid-Coot said:

Looking at the money earned rankings for animation and family - talking animal I'm surprised they're trying the live action route. It seems way easier to make money on a pure cartoon.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=animation.htm

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=talkinganimal.htm

Live action is cheaper to make though.

[Rabid-Coot]

4 minutes ago, Razule said:

Live action is cheaper to make though.

Illumination have managed to keep their budgets around 75-80 million.

[DabigRG]

On 12/10/2018 at 10:12 AM, Razule said:

At this point, it could only look worse if it looked like this:

Honestly, if the animal world to human world transformation is a legit thing, a touched up version of that might work better.

On 12/10/2018 at 10:23 AM, Scar said:

Who decided this movie HAD to be live-action. What was stopping it from being a Wreck-it-Ralph style or Pixar style animation. Fucking SEGA could have got Marza Planet to do this shit for them and it would have at least looked as good as Night of the Werehog.

 

Which was in production first: this or the Mario movie?

 

On 12/10/2018 at 10:23 AM, Scar said:

I am reading, and I am internally weeping.
Who decided this movie HAD to be live-action. What was stopping it from being a Wreck-it-Ralph style or Pixar style animation. Fucking SEGA could have got Marza Planet to do this shit for them and it would have at least looked as good as Night of the Werehog.

This is baffling. Baffling because the gaming brand has pilloried its once decent reputation post-Generations through disasters such as Boom and now Forces, with Mania doing its best to keep it head held high with all the bullshit crumbling down around it. This movie can only be bad. It can only harm the franchise's reputation.

I fucking hope this nonsense gets cancelled, when some executive sees some goddamn sense.

I don't like entertaining this kind of mindset, but I kinda do too.

Just cancel it, keep the licensing money, and use between 25-50% of it to make a new polished game that also has an appropriate balance of originality and comfortableness.

[Ryannumber1gamer]

Causing an uproar on the internet over a bad design to basically go “lawl, gotcha!” would be a downright awful marketing strategy. There’s literally no joke from it. 

You wanna know why it worked for Deadpool? Because Deadpool’s origins design was played straight, for over five years, that was meant to be a serious take on Deadpool as a character and surprise surprise, it sucked balls. It’s funny in Deadpool because it’s Deadpool and/or Ryan Reynolds taking something that was meant to be a legit design and mocking it for how stupid it was, and even at that, in really funny ways, especially how Deadpool 2 handles it. 

The only thing filmmakers would get from making a elaborate fake CG design is pissing off a lot of the internet for no particular reason, which would then probably backfire hard come the movie’s release.

[PeterPancake]

The face will probably look like this

[Tornado]

39 minutes ago, Ryannumber1Santa said:

Causing an uproar on the internet over a bad design to basically go “lawl, gotcha!” would be a downright awful marketing strategy. There’s literally no joke from it.

That doesn't mean that it is outside the realm of possibility. I can easily see a marketing guy in Hollywood trying to leverage the Sonic fanbase's almost inevitable outrage to something this movie was going to do at some point as deliberate marketing fuel. It wouldn't even be hard to know about instances in the past of that happening in a similar context, since a big example has already been posted recently in this thread; not to criticize Blacklightning's excellent post about character silhouettes as they pertain to overall designs.

 

 

 

Now, whether that's a wise path is a question that we won't know until the returns come in, but I will note three things:

1. The fandom's response to this movie outside of these is already not necessarily in lockstep with the people outside of the fandom. Even only broadening it to casual fans like those on dedicated videogame forums (and not the general moviegoing populace who may just go to "I recognize Sonic" rather than even a casual fan of the games themselves), I've already seen that on places like ResetEra that the response is frequently "wow those Sonic fans sure are being fucking overdramatic assholes about this. Again" rather than "I now have no intention of seeing this movie just like those Sonic fans."
2. This movie now has a whole hell of a lot more attention than the fucking Ratchet and Clank PS4 remake's 90 minute advertisement ever had.
3. If this poster stuff was a stunt to obfuscate his actual design, you know how easy it would be to spin it in a way that people would adore? "We took the design criticism into consideration and tweaked his design to something more recognizable." That was a single sentence; and the film is early enough in post that they could explain it away as being the truth.

[DabigRG]

On 12/10/2018 at 10:24 AM, DiamondX said:

Isn't Marza working on this movie though? I may be wrong but I hear so.

That must be what that transition thing is about.

On 12/10/2018 at 10:28 AM, Tarnish said:

Are we sure they didn't just go "well, screw the CGI Sonic idea" and hired SonicFox to play the role?

Who?

On 12/10/2018 at 10:28 AM, Spooky Mulder said:

Does he have fingers instead of gloves? I can't tell but it looks that way to me. Very spindly looking. Kinda creepy.

This looks like a bad piece of Ken Penders art.

Nah, his artwork looks better stylized than this render.

Now, the coloring...

On 12/10/2018 at 10:29 AM, Myst said:

I think Sonic looks bad, but the way the poster is PRESENTED is nice (as in, dark colors, an action stance) i like it for that.

But boy am i uneasy about the full reveal.

Yeah, sorta.

 

 

On 12/10/2018 at 10:37 AM, Operationgamer17 said:

It’s $90 million, to be exact.

Are you serious?

 

On 12/10/2018 at 10:31 AM, Alexios31 said:

I am actually laughing at people thinking that a 100 million + dollar movie will be canceled or "scrapped" just because some don't like the design of Sonic.

Thats not how it all works.

What don't we all just give a movie a chance?

Better to cancel it than to spend the full amount plus thousands more on marketing on the off chance this will be a modest success that makes back it's original bucket.

On 12/10/2018 at 10:41 AM, Sonic Fan J said:

 

On another note, though I did not watch the Ted movies, hearing Sonic compared to that with what I saw from trailers and commercials worries me in a completely different way. 

Which is funny, considering Detective Pikachu was openly embracing that very style and is mostly pulling it off.

 

[Scar]

23 hours ago, PeterPancake said:

Blur studios has worked on Deadpool, Sonic, Thor: TDW, Halo, Arkham series etc. They've won an Academy Award for their animations. Not to discredit your time studying animation but these guys have been doing work for blockbuster films since 1995. I'm pretty sure they know what proportions look right on the character. Everybody in here has suddenly become an expert on character design, acting like they know more than producers with 20+ years of experience in the industry.

This is a really egregious comment to be perfectly honest. As someone has already stated, just because they've been doing something for 20 years, doesn't mean its good. Takashi Iizuka has been working on Sonic games since the franchise's inception way back in 1991, and you can bet there are plenty of people on this very forum who question his ability to take this franchise forward in a positive direction.
The design is trash. Maybe the story will be good? Who knows, but I have my doubts. But ultimately a lot hinges on the character design and it just is not a winner. It is quite literally a meme. Its fucking been 2 days and its a meme. A joke.

23 hours ago, PeterPancake said:

If you didn't know what Sonic looked like in the games, would you honestly hate this design as much as you all do?

Yes. I didn't watch much TMNT, still thought the live-action designs were absolute trash. It looks like a guy painted blue wearing a mascot head. And more to the point, if myself or anyone else didn't know what Sonic looked like in the game, this very forum (and countless others) would not exist. And neither would this movie actually, cause it wouldn't have been popular enough to receive this kind of Hollywood punishment......That might actually be preferable to the current outcome now that I think about it.

22 hours ago, PeterPancake said:

Last time I checked, Ohshima did not make a 5 paragraph long Twitter rant about how they ruined his design. He just doesn't agree with their decision to make Sonic realistic. This is nothing like the fans who ARE foaming at the mouth, threatening to boycott the movie and wanting it to be "Buried", completely disregarding all of the hardworking effort innocent crew members put into this movie, all because Sonic had developed thighs. Patrick is not talking about people like Yuji Naka or Oshima. He's talking about the fans who are acting like the Apocalypse is imminent because Sonic's design makes more anatomical sense. 

This is a forum. A forum for fans to discuss things. I know people who work in VFX. Most of the time, they just do what they're told. The reality is, the film producers will send out a bunch of VFX work to a bunch of small studios to do. That could be character/creature work, foliage, structural or vehicular designs. The VFX artists come up with concepts and models and present to the client for feedback. Sometimes they have to start over cause some idiot fuck executive changed their minds late in production. Those guys, I sympathise with. But similarly I don't blame any of them. They're just doing what the client wants, whether or not they personally approve of the design they're bringing to life. The people I blame for this monstrosity, are the higher-ups in production who specified and okayed this horrific design. They're to blame for this, and I reserve my rights to criticise the fuck out of them for it.

21 hours ago, Ruomarta said:

You know, and to call me crazy if you want, but I truly think they had VERY little say in what goes on in this movie production. I don't know I just can't shake this feeling.

Then why did they allow it to be made? What kind of fucking moron signs away the rights to interfere and/or shape the direction of the first major Hollywood production of their marquee franchise. The franchise that is inexorably linked to their goddamn identity. Who allows this to happen? SEGA are straight up said to have not liked the design at all, but the production team was like "Well, we think this is the best approach so deal with it". They allowed themselves to be put in a position where they can only watch on in horror as this film is produced. They have nobody but themselves to blame for it.

Frankly, I think a movie wasn't even needed. But if it was, they should have been overseeing it every step of the way. If they lack the resources or even the fucking commitment to oversee it, it shouldn't have been made. What we're seeing here could ONLY have happened under these exact circumstances where Hollywood are allowed to get away with focus testing an iconic design into oblivion.

[Blueknight V2.0]

1 hour ago, DabigRG said:

And did we really need to add the lightning for such an iconic character in their own right?

What does that remind me of?

Well the only example (and a great example at that) I can think of is the Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water. Plus I think the electricity is a nice touch, since it's likely static electricity can be built up at those speeds.

[Tarnish]

On 12/11/2018 at 7:29 PM, PeterPancake said:

Blur studios has worked on Deadpool, Sonic, Thor: TDW, Halo, Arkham series etc. They've won an Academy Award for their animations. Not to discredit your time studying animation but these guys have been doing work for blockbuster films since 1995. I'm pretty sure they know what proportions look right on the character. Everybody in here has suddenly become an expert on character design, acting like they know more than producers with 20+ years of experience in the industry.

You don't have to be an expert at making something to notice that the end result is trash. I'm not a car designer, but if a car has only 3 wheels touching the ground at the same time and it's tottering left and right, I think the suggestion that that car is awfully designed is valid.

7 minutes ago, Blue Knight/Bluestreak said:

Well the only example (and a great example at that) I can think of is the Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water. Plus I think the electricity is a nice touch, since it's likely static electricity can be built up at those speeds.

Static electricity in the eyes? Sounds like ouch.

[Red Hot Jack]

I would settle for this, honestly.

[DabigRG]

On 12/10/2018 at 10:47 AM, Marcello said:

I think it was a bad idea to show this silhouette first. They should've brought out a trailer. For all I know this design will click when I see it in the movie interacting with people.

Detective Pikachu knocked that out of the park. Though, that design is also much better and truer to the games than what I can see here.

Sonic's design is much more marketable to a wider audience than this. It's simple and clean like Mickey Mouse. Pun not intended.

Yeah, I can't help but feel they should've just used a slightly scaled version of the game model in his world with part of the poster showing off the human world sequestered away from him.  Maybe have his hand changing into something else to tease the plot point that he'll change when enters the real world.

On 12/10/2018 at 10:51 AM, Stasis said:

Just watched it properly and at the end Sonic's shoes and "pupil" are the only parts with the electricity(?) on them. So he's got 'power sneakers' and... Eye wear? 

Does he?

On 12/10/2018 at 10:54 AM, gato said:

Ahh yes, this will replace that Illbleed boss in my nightmares.

pic for reference.

  Hide contents

 

 

 

And that's also more on model.

 

Also, who seriously looked at Toy Story and decided it needed Sonic?

On 12/10/2018 at 10:55 AM, Mayor D said:

Since when does Sonic need to look like he can take a punch?

I don't remember that happening in Sonic 1?

Because it didn't. That was Sonic 2.

On 12/10/2018 at 10:58 AM, Shadowlax said:

I know we in are in " panic mode"

But their decision to make separate products for different fanbases is actually a good idea. Trying to please too many fanbases with one product is usually why a lot of their bad products ... are bad.

I don't think Forces was bad, but it definitely pops into mind for that.

On 12/10/2018 at 11:00 AM, MarioAmigosYT said:

Can we have a Sonic Mania movie instead of this please?

How would you make a movie from that?