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


Badnik Mechanic

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You know there is one other song Viacom could have used, they had it in one of their own trailers too:

 

I mean they used it for Star trek beyond

Yeah I am just thinking of other songs they could have used instead of gangsters paradise....

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Actually the teeth didn't look as bad to me when you see the video actually in motion but yeah I definitely would have preferred sharp SA1 teeth to Ken Penders esc human teeth.  Also, they probably should have given him gloves.

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9 minutes ago, Blacklightning said:

I'ma just lay out a hot take while it's still fresh on my mind. Whenever the subject of cynical, shareholder-focused money grabs like this comes up, a similar strain of logic is brought up pretty much each time - that the audience for lack of a better word can't engage with the subject material, and their solution to that is something they can engage with by proxy. To put it in layman's terms, basically what Sonic X did - because of the belief that Sonic and his world is too "weird", they set it in modern day Earth and gave an otherwise unremarkable human being equal billing with Sonic himself. Now let me just preface this by saying I believe this argument is the purest bullshit, but humouring it gave me a handful of interesting thoughts I hadn't really considered before.

Let me get the more obvious one out of the way first - whatever they're trying with this, they're really fucking bad at it. When I say "by proxy", I mean a position a member of the intended audience could see themselves in. For example, a lot of recent monster movies like your Godzillas and your Rampages and your King Kongs, they'll most likely throw in a tough human lead because publishers don't think a literal monster will be able to carry a feature film by itself and much of the audience will be watching it for the fights so it's possible they think the audience identifies with that on some level. Obviously Sonic hasn't been entirely spared from that train of thought because I already mentioned Sonic X, which had Chris Thorndyke acting as an audience stand-in.

Now if you're like me you've probably read all that and started thinking "hang on a minute, what part of a middle aged cop with a tranq gun is supposed to identify with the audience of a Sonic movie?", and that's just the thing - it absolutely doesn't, on any conceivable level. I'm just going to say this part straight. Like it or not, Sonic is a franchise geared at kids. Chris was a kid because most of the people watching Sonic X were kids. Most of the Sonic cast themselves, though not always overtly, are kids because the audience playing their games are generally kids. Even Ken fucking Penders, absolute hack as he is, wasn't dumb enough to cast anything other than a kid for this purpose when he tried pitching a Sonic film of his own. It takes a truly impressive feat of mental gymnastics to take an approach to narrative this cynical and manage to fuck up really hard even by THOSE expectations like they did with Tom the cop here, who at best sounds like they only have anything in common with a very small number of parents that have to look after their kids through this shit show.

That brings me to probably the more controversial of my two hot takes. It needs to be said that Paramount is leaning hard on the "isolated alien" angle, to the extent that it seems to form the bulk of the overarching plot - weird alien creature appears, government want to contain weird alien creature. I'm saying "alien" a lot here because I mean that in more than the strictly literal sense. Not just that he's from another world, but that he doesn't fit in even aesthetically, despite all the work they've done to accomodate his looks in a live action flick. And this would go back to the very first point - Sonic is alien to the audience too, so the need for a stand-in character is perceived as a necessity. This is why I've come to believe that Sonic's design isn't an accident, or even a negligent point of view - but rather a completely intentional design decision made soley to force the alienation angle, in more ways than one.

And to me that makes sense in a lot of ways, not just to push their cynical, self-fulfilling prophecy but to give what looks like an astonishly low budget CG flick an excuse to only need to render one actual CG character at any given time, not counting Eggman's robots and stuff like that. Now I'm not a fucking mind reader and can't say for sure what was going through their heads exactly when they decided Sonic looked okay with that, because for all I know they could have been coked out of their mind and using design documents as toilet paper 90% of the time and it would have sounded equally as plausible - but Hollywood in general, nevermind VG movies, have been drinking in this kind of cynical bullshit far too long for me to just rule it out, and on some level that still scares and sickens me.

I'm really tired and admittedly rambling so hopefully that all makes some semblance of sense. Maybe it sounded better in my head.

Did it ever say anywhere though that the movie's target audience was specifically to kids? Even so I would prefer a cop that might actually have some degree of influence and benefit to Sonic as a foothold into the human world than just some random kid who literally can't do anything significant outside of his own subplot. But yeah, unnecessary human main character/ers again. To be honest though I would have expect that more from Hollywood than from literally anywhere else. To me it will all depend on how much time actually goes into the Sonic aspects and how much time is wasted on the obligatory human only parts.

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1 minute ago, Mark_The_Dephiles said:

Did it ever say anywhere though that the movie's target audience was specifically to kids?

That's not something I would know for sure, but here's the way I see it - if that's true, it's a failure to understand that audience, and if it's false it's a failure to understand what audience this kind of film appeals to. In my book, either option is still a monumental fuckup.

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27 minutes ago, Blacklightning said:

...a literal monster will be able to carry a feature film by itself...

This right here is just 100% factual.

And isn't really the best example, that'd just be non-stop destruction or just nothing.

The thing with movies like this is that rather than introducing the audience to Sonic's world and letting them get used to that, it's simply much easier to just use our world and not try.

It pretty much means they don't have to really put out a movie that is entirely Sonic and just cherry pick out the most recognizable elements, that's kinda lame.

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5 minutes ago, Mark_The_Dephiles said:

Did it ever say anywhere though that the movie's target audience was specifically to kids?

Actually if I remember correctly years ago I read this movie was going to be targeting adults in their 20s and that the movie will be PG-13.

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1 minute ago, Blacklightning said:

That's not something I would know for sure, but here's the way I see it - if that's true, it's a failure to understand that audience, and if it's false it's a failure to understand what audience this kind of film appeals to. In my book, either option is still a monumental fuckup.

I don't think Sonic is that popular with the kids these days.

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31 minutes ago, Blacklightning said:

I'ma just lay out a hot take while it's still fresh on my mind. Whenever the subject of cynical, shareholder-focused money grabs like this comes up, a similar strain of logic is brought up pretty much each time - that the audience for lack of a better word can't engage with the subject material, and their solution to that is something they can engage with by proxy. To put it in layman's terms, basically what Sonic X did - because of the belief that Sonic and his world is too "weird", they set it in modern day Earth and gave an otherwise unremarkable human being equal billing with Sonic himself. Now let me just preface this by saying I believe this argument is the purest bullshit, but humouring it gave me a handful of interesting thoughts I hadn't really considered before.

Let me get the more obvious one out of the way first - whatever they're trying with this, they're really fucking bad at it. When I say "by proxy", I mean a position a member of the intended audience could see themselves in. For example, a lot of recent monster movies like your Godzillas and your Rampages and your King Kongs, they'll most likely throw in a tough human lead because publishers don't think a literal monster will be able to carry a feature film by itself and much of the audience will be watching it for the fights so it's possible they think the audience identifies with that on some level. Obviously Sonic hasn't been entirely spared from that train of thought because I already mentioned Sonic X, which had Chris Thorndyke acting as an audience stand-in.

Now if you're like me you've probably read all that and started thinking "hang on a minute, what part of a middle aged cop with a tranq gun is supposed to identify with the audience of a Sonic movie?", and that's just the thing - it absolutely doesn't, on any conceivable level. I'm just going to say this part straight. Like it or not, Sonic is a franchise geared at kids. Chris was a kid because most of the people watching Sonic X were kids. Most of the Sonic cast themselves, though not always overtly, are kids because the audience playing their games are generally kids. Even Ken fucking Penders, absolute hack as he is, wasn't dumb enough to cast anything other than a kid for this purpose when he tried pitching a Sonic film of his own. It takes a truly impressive feat of mental gymnastics to take an approach to narrative this cynical and manage to fuck up really hard even by THOSE expectations like they did with Tom the cop here, who at best sounds like they only have anything in common with a very small number of parents that have to look after their kids through this shit show.

That brings me to probably the more controversial of my two hot takes. It needs to be said that Paramount is leaning hard on the "isolated alien" angle, to the extent that it seems to form the bulk of the overarching plot - weird alien creature appears, government want to contain weird alien creature. I'm saying "alien" a lot here because I mean that in more than the strictly literal sense. Not just that he's from another world, but that he doesn't fit in even aesthetically, despite all the work they've done to accomodate his looks in a live action flick. And this would go back to the very first point - Sonic is alien to the audience too, so the need for a stand-in character is perceived as a necessity. This is why I've come to believe that Sonic's design isn't an accident, or even a negligent point of view - but rather a completely intentional design decision made soley to force the alienation angle, in more ways than one.

And to me that makes sense in a lot of ways, not just to push their cynical, self-fulfilling prophecy but to give what looks like an astonishly low budget CG flick an excuse to only need to render one actual CG character at any given time, not counting Eggman's robots and stuff like that. Now I'm not a fucking mind reader and can't say for sure what was going through their heads exactly when they decided Sonic looked okay with that, because for all I know they could have been coked out of their mind and using design documents as toilet paper 90% of the time and it would have sounded equally as plausible - but Hollywood in general, nevermind VG movies, have been drinking in this kind of cynical bullshit far too long for me to just rule it out, and on some level that still scares and sickens me.

I'm really tired and admittedly rambling so hopefully that all makes some semblance of sense. Maybe it sounded better in my head.

I believe the idea is that the kid character, is sonic. The character the children are supposed to identify with is sonic, he will be a wiley rascal trying to help occasionally messing things up and basically be the weird grimlin baby of the cop character. The cop character is supposed to be the ones that the adults taking their children to see the movie is supposed to identify with. Considering this is the first film ( and hopefully the only film ) in this series and it primary takes place in the human world they problably aren't gonna introduce a concept so crazy that you need a stand in character for the kids. And the adults in this scenario are assumed to be cognizant enough to get " he cam from another world, ring portal, eggman bad sonic fast " not only are they relying on adults being able to get fairly simple plot points but folks nostalgic for sonic stuff is also an audience they are aiming for so they also have a character to identify with . Going so far as to put an actor who played a sonic character in a cartoon apparently, in the movie and that probably wont be the only one. I suspect a jaleel white cameo.

Now i'm not saying this is good or bad. Personally I find this film to be the most bizarre thing I have seen in quite sometime. At least the trailer. So many failures had to occur for it to look as bad as it does, and it looks so bad. 

But there is semblance of logic of what they were trying to do, its just done poorly and probably didn't need to be done at all

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32 minutes ago, Mark_The_Dephiles said:

I don't think Sonic is that popular with the kids these days.

I agree with that statement actually. However it isn't that Sonic doesn't sell to kids, it is that Sonic doesn't sell to kids nearly as much as it used to out of not being a super popular modern freshly made franchise like it used to be. Sonic appeals more to teens and young adults these days, which is not a strange result from certain older franchises as their fan-bases got older and something about them failing to connect to new audiences. Sonic is still a greatly well known series with a big fan-base... but I'm not convinced much of the fan-base are kids anymore. Anyways that is just my opinion/theory on it.

Misguided or not I can understand and see why the movie team thought targeting older people was a good idea as many people who grew up with Sonic in the 90s and early 2000s are adults now and might make up for the bulk of the people who'll go see the movie... However either way they did not do a good job at what they were trying to do... Even if they were actually aiming this movie at adults... the thing is that means keeping Sonic true to his game-self and that fantasy world they grew up with is even more important for adults who have far more premade expectations then certain kids who never seen Sonic before. And on the other side of the coin kids also would probably enjoy something more wacky, cute and cartoony instead of what this movie is going for.

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15 minutes ago, Lord-Dreamerz said:

I agree with that statement actually. However it isn't that Sonic doesn't sell to kids, it is that Sonic doesn't sell to kids nearly as much as it used to out of not being a super popular modern freshly made franchise like it used to be. Sonic appeals more to teens and young adults these days, which is not a strange result from certain older franchises as their fan-bases got older and something about them failing to connect to new audiences. Sonic is still a greatly well known series with a big fan-base... but I'm not convinced much of the fan-base are kids anymore. Anyways that is just my opinion/theory on it.

Misguided or not I can understand and see why the movie team thought targeting older people was a good idea as many people who grew up with Sonic in the 90s and early 2000s are adults now and might make up for the bulk of the people who'll go see the movie... However either way they did not do a good job at what they were trying to do... Even if they were actually aiming this movie at adults... the thing is that means keeping Sonic true to his game-self and that fantasy world they grew up with is even more important for adults who have far more premade expectations then certain kids who never seen Sonic before. And on the other side of the coin kids also would probably enjoy something more wacky, cute and cartoony instead of what this movie is going for.

Those are pretty much my sentiments on the fanbase age as well. Though I don't think kids are really that into the cute wacky cartoons type stuff as people make them out to be. Just try playing any mainstream fps game on Xbox live and you will see what I mean.... 

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12 minutes ago, Mark_The_Dephiles said:

Those are pretty much my sentiments on the fanbase age as well. Though I don't think kids are really that into the cute wacky cartoons type stuff as people make them out to be. Just try playing any mainstream fps game on Xbox live and you will see what I mean.... 

Well kids also like Teen Titans Go! don't they? But yes I am aware kids also love horror games like FNAF and online battle games like Fortnite.

However maybe you are slightly right... Perhaps wacky, cute and cartoony stuff appeals bit more to dork adults like me nowadays. xD

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I'm honestly reeling from what a spectacularly awful idea Tom is. That's 100% true @Blacklightning, he's a middle aged cop with a tranquilizer, that's...dare I say a bit too niche for anyone to really identify with? Unless he's supposed to be a stand-in for the disinterested parents who are taking their kids to this. In which case, maybe in a few months we'll see videos called "The Secret Genius of Tom the Cop" and calling for him to be brought into the games.

tumblr_inline_ngcsf6UBZG1r8z4qq.gif.518c41141736c961d2654f95431b50fa.gif

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What's kind of funny is that this movie looks bad, but enough people are going to go see it because it looks so bad that it will probably be a successful movie.

Well, that and parents taking kids to see it because it is a CG movie with a blue hedgehog.

Hollywood is going to think this is what we want because it is going to do well.

I'm gonna go see it too becuase i can't miss out on this travesty...

What a comedic tragedy of a world we live in...

 

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4 minutes ago, Unidus said:

...this movie looks bad, but enough people are going to go see it because it looks so bad...

I understand this logic.

It's still the dumbest thing.

I'll never understand this.

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You're free to watch it if you think it'll be bad, but please don't give money to this thing unless you think it'll be good.

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45 minutes ago, DreamSaturn said:

Obviously I can't stop you and it's your choice in the end, but to quote The Critic: "If the movie stinks, just don't go."

Or just wait til it gets pirated or streamed for free on the internet.

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For better or for worse, it seems Yuji Naka shares our pit of despair.

Capture.JPG

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Translation: It is wrong age to compare. I had a sense of incongruity with just having a sword because I was made Sonic since I left SEGA, but I wanted to see that the Hollywood version says Sonic so cool compared to 1991 if compared.

 

Translation: After all Jim Carrey is good. Eggman is looking forward to.

I know DreamSaturn posted an similar version of the post, but this is kinda clearer.

 

Translation: I remembered that the design of Hollywood Sonic was unpopular, but I remembered that CG of this movie is made by Marza, but I created this department called Visual Entertainment, the predecessor of Marza, the visual entertainment of Sega. So I felt sorry for being responsible as well. https://www.marza.com/news/article/764/ 

 

Translation: In other words, I was asking you to have the film appear as an extra, but it was forgotten. It was quite a while ago and I forgot too. I wanted to appear in a Hollywood movie, though.

Well, this sucks.:

Also, I found this interview with the Detective Pikachu Cinematographer about the movie backlash.:

https://www.newsweek.com/detective-pikachu-sonic-hedgehog-movie-vs-comparison-1411983

 

 

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4 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

I'ma just lay out a hot take while it's still fresh on my mind. Whenever the subject of cynical, shareholder-focused money grabs like this comes up, a similar strain of logic is brought up pretty much each time - that the audience for lack of a better word can't engage with the subject material, and their solution to that is something they can engage with by proxy. To put it in layman's terms, basically what Sonic X did - because of the belief that Sonic and his world is too "weird", they set it in modern day Earth and gave an otherwise unremarkable human being equal billing with Sonic himself. Now let me just preface this by saying I believe this argument is the purest bullshit, but humouring it gave me a handful of interesting thoughts I hadn't really considered before.

Let me get the more obvious one out of the way first - whatever they're trying with this, they're really fucking bad at it. When I say "by proxy", I mean a position a member of the intended audience could see themselves in. For example, a lot of recent monster movies like your Godzillas and your Rampages and your King Kongs, they'll most likely throw in a tough human lead because publishers don't think a literal monster will be able to carry a feature film by itself and much of the audience will be watching it for the fights so it's possible they think the audience identifies with that on some level. Obviously Sonic hasn't been entirely spared from that train of thought because I already mentioned Sonic X, which had Chris Thorndyke acting as an audience stand-in.

Now if you're like me you've probably read all that and started thinking "hang on a minute, what part of a middle aged cop with a tranq gun is supposed to identify with the audience of a Sonic movie?", and that's just the thing - it absolutely doesn't, on any conceivable level. I'm just going to say this part straight. Like it or not, Sonic is a franchise geared at kids. Chris was a kid because most of the people watching Sonic X were kids. Most of the Sonic cast themselves, though not always overtly, are kids because the audience playing their games are generally kids. Even Ken fucking Penders, absolute hack as he is, wasn't dumb enough to cast anything other than a kid for this purpose when he tried pitching a Sonic film of his own. It takes a truly impressive feat of mental gymnastics to take an approach to narrative this cynical and manage to fuck up really hard even by THOSE expectations like they did with Tom the cop here, who at best sounds like they only have anything in common with a very small number of parents that have to look after their kids through this shit show.

That brings me to probably the more controversial of my two hot takes. It needs to be said that Paramount is leaning hard on the "isolated alien" angle, to the extent that it seems to form the bulk of the overarching plot - weird alien creature appears, government want to contain weird alien creature. I'm saying "alien" a lot here because I mean that in more than the strictly literal sense. Not just that he's from another world, but that he doesn't fit in even aesthetically, despite all the work they've done to accomodate his looks in a live action flick. And this would go back to the very first point - Sonic is alien to the audience too, so the need for a stand-in character is perceived as a necessity. This is why I've come to believe that Sonic's design isn't an accident, or even a negligent point of view - but rather a completely intentional design decision made soley to force the alienation angle, in more ways than one.

And to me that makes sense in a lot of ways, not just to push their cynical, self-fulfilling prophecy but to give what looks like an astonishly low budget CG flick an excuse to only need to render one actual CG character at any given time, not counting Eggman's robots and stuff like that. Now I'm not a fucking mind reader and can't say for sure what was going through their heads exactly when they decided Sonic looked okay with that, because for all I know they could have been coked out of their mind and using design documents as toilet paper 90% of the time and it would have sounded equally as plausible - but Hollywood in general, nevermind VG movies, have been drinking in this kind of cynical bullshit far too long for me to just rule it out, and on some level that still scares and sickens me.

I'm really tired and admittedly rambling so hopefully that all makes some semblance of sense. Maybe it sounded better in my head.

If Sonic was meant to look alien, why the human teeth?!  This actually got brought up many pages back; since the film is going with Sonic X's idea that Sonic is from another planet, there shouldn't have been any perceived need to make him conform to our world's animal physiology.  An alien can look like anything, which means that Sonic in any past design he's ever had can look alien.

3 hours ago, Mark_The_Dephiles said:

I don't think Sonic is that popular with the kids these days.

Probably not, but according to an interview Sega is more interested in pitching him to children in general these days than just the edgy children and teens he was pitched at back in the Genesis era.  They rightly consider that times, and games, have changed, and a hedgehog can no longer be the edgiest personality in gaming.  So Sonic is generally aimed at children.

Is this movie, though?  Honestly, it's hard to say, and not just because it uses such an inappropriate song in the trailer.  Also because it's so afraid of using almost anything whimsical from the series.  If they're making this movie for children, they look to be doing an awful job.

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2 hours ago, Shaddy Zaphod said:

please don't give money to this thing unless you think it'll be good

These days I feel the "supporting/paying for only quality stuff" sentiment could join the likes off the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. In other words, things that just don't exist.

In this day and age, I'm starting to believe if a game/movie commercially fails, it's purely because not enough people knew about it, not because of their quality. If you market the hell out of even the biggest piece of shit, you'll make money. People will give money for it just out of curiosity, to cover how bad it is or just for the lolz.

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5 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

I'ma just lay out a hot take while it's still fresh on my mind. Whenever the subject of cynical, shareholder-focused money grabs like this comes up, a similar strain of logic is brought up pretty much each time - that the audience for lack of a better word can't engage with the subject material, and their solution to that is something they can engage with by proxy. To put it in layman's terms, basically what Sonic X did - because of the belief that Sonic and his world is too "weird", they set it in modern day Earth and gave an otherwise unremarkable human being equal billing with Sonic himself. Now let me just preface this by saying I believe this argument is the purest bullshit, but humouring it gave me a handful of interesting thoughts I hadn't really considered before.

Let me get the more obvious one out of the way first - whatever they're trying with this, they're really fucking bad at it. When I say "by proxy", I mean a position a member of the intended audience could see themselves in. For example, a lot of recent monster movies like your Godzillas and your Rampages and your King Kongs, they'll most likely throw in a tough human lead because publishers don't think a literal monster will be able to carry a feature film by itself and much of the audience will be watching it for the fights so it's possible they think the audience identifies with that on some level. Obviously Sonic hasn't been entirely spared from that train of thought because I already mentioned Sonic X, which had Chris Thorndyke acting as an audience stand-in.

Now if you're like me you've probably read all that and started thinking "hang on a minute, what part of a middle aged cop with a tranq gun is supposed to identify with the audience of a Sonic movie?", and that's just the thing - it absolutely doesn't, on any conceivable level. I'm just going to say this part straight. Like it or not, Sonic is a franchise geared at kids. Chris was a kid because most of the people watching Sonic X were kids. Most of the Sonic cast themselves, though not always overtly, are kids because the audience playing their games are generally kids. Even Ken fucking Penders, absolute hack as he is, wasn't dumb enough to cast anything other than a kid for this purpose when he tried pitching a Sonic film of his own. It takes a truly impressive feat of mental gymnastics to take an approach to narrative this cynical and manage to fuck up really hard even by THOSE expectations like they did with Tom the cop here, who at best sounds like they only have anything in common with a very small number of parents that have to look after their kids through this shit show.

That brings me to probably the more controversial of my two hot takes. It needs to be said that Paramount is leaning hard on the "isolated alien" angle, to the extent that it seems to form the bulk of the overarching plot - weird alien creature appears, government want to contain weird alien creature. I'm saying "alien" a lot here because I mean that in more than the strictly literal sense. Not just that he's from another world, but that he doesn't fit in even aesthetically, despite all the work they've done to accomodate his looks in a live action flick. And this would go back to the very first point - Sonic is alien to the audience too, so the need for a stand-in character is perceived as a necessity. This is why I've come to believe that Sonic's design isn't an accident, or even a negligent point of view - but rather a completely intentional design decision made soley to force the alienation angle, in more ways than one.

And to me that makes sense in a lot of ways, not just to push their cynical, self-fulfilling prophecy but to give what looks like an astonishly low budget CG flick an excuse to only need to render one actual CG character at any given time, not counting Eggman's robots and stuff like that. Now I'm not a fucking mind reader and can't say for sure what was going through their heads exactly when they decided Sonic looked okay with that, because for all I know they could have been coked out of their mind and using design documents as toilet paper 90% of the time and it would have sounded equally as plausible - but Hollywood in general, nevermind VG movies, have been drinking in this kind of cynical bullshit far too long for me to just rule it out, and on some level that still scares and sickens me.

I'm really tired and admittedly rambling so hopefully that all makes some semblance of sense. Maybe it sounded better in my head.

In this case, I consider Sonic X's inclusion of Chris and the movie's inclusion of Tom to be two separate animals.  The narrative justification is the same on paper, but when it comes things like the live action movie, I tend to think that is just the justification they throw out because it sounds like they're more invested in the artistic integrity of the story telling, rather than transparently throwing out marketing mumbo jumbo. I think the obligatory human protagonist has no real intention other than to have the actor carry a lot of the weight of the film's marketing.  This tends to manifest itself a lot in the actual films.  Peter Rabbit isn't a movie about the eponymous character and his friends.  They are there and interact with the plot to a certain extent, but the critical focus of the movie is on Domhnall Gleeson's character winning the affections of Rose Byrne's character.  The Smurfs isn't about the actual Smurfs.  Again, they do interact with the plot and exist for the duration of the movie, but the core of the movie is about Niel Patrick Harris.  Going really far back, Kangaroo Jack isn't about the titular Kangaroo, it's about the tense gay subtext bromance between Jerry O'Connell and Anthony Anderson as well as the former's awkwardly unfolding romantic relationship with Estella Warren's character.  This is a rather extreme one, because despite being the titular character and the majority of the marketing focus, Kangaroo Jack is barely in the movie, and despite what the commercials showed, he can't even really talk.  The one and only time he does is during a... rather weird dream sequence mid-way through the movie.

All this to say that I will at least give the movie credit in that I'm expecting Sonic will actually have a larger role than the examples I've listed.  But I'm still expecting in some way the emotional core of the movie's narrative will be focused on Tom in some way.  Because the movie won't be about Sonic, but about James Marsden.  Even if Sonic is instrumental in that emotional core, the crux of the character development will still be on Tom.

As a disclaimer, I'm not saying with certainty that will be the case, but some basic pattern recognition makes it highly likely to me.

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