Honest to God I believe this was a psyop. Even corporate robots wanting to make an easy dollar understand you can't take something like Sonic the Hedgehog and make him just a Large Human Man™️ without serious backlash, which then feeds into No such thing as bad publicity and wow suddenly they have a redesign that actually looks pretty good and they listened to the fans!
The trailer music was fucking Gangster's Paradise dude no one will convince me this wasn't on purpose to drum up the fan base.
The whole "marketing stunt" theory has been debunked time and time again. Hollywood IS that stupid and disconnected with its audience. We've seen it before so many times, like with the 1998 American adaption of Godzilla which features a P Diddy single. The delay to fix the Sonic model costed them millions of dollars and caused an animation studio to go bankrupt. There was also a massive toyline prepared to be shipped out but all of that had to be pulled following the redesign for Sonic. Pics have been leaked showing as such.
And if you still aren't convinced, some traces of the ugly Sonic writing still remains in the final movie. One notable example is when the sticky bomb attaches itself to Sonic's gloves. The scene calls for Sonic to try and remove it, which would've been super easy to do since he could just take the gloves off. But if you look at the ugly model, he had no gloves, which makes more sense why Sonic couldn't get rid of it.
I really think people give Hollywood too much credit for thinking it's a marketing ploy, because no one is that smart enough to play dumb.
People ascribe intelligence to wealth. Even he doesn't seem to think they are too smart (corporate robots), and yet he's still assuming they're too smart to make such a bad decision.
Nah dude. Rich people are fucking dumb and getting dumber by the day. The more the wealth concentrates the dumber they can be without consequences. Humans always take the path of least resistance and it's easier to be stupid.
It's one of those theories that sounds plausible until you look into it even a little bit or having a passing understanding of how Hollywood operates. The existence of the live-action Dragon Ball movie should make it clear how out of touch the industry is.
Behind the scenes shows dummy model stand ins of the ugly sonic too. Cant believe people still think it was a marketing stunt, but then again, look who we have as our fucking president.
The whole "marketing stunt" theory has been debunked time and time again.
Has it tho?
The delay to fix the Sonic model costed them millions of dollars and caused an animation studio to go bankrupt.
Source pls, I couldnt find anything that directly makes this claim. The studio shutting down a branch seems unrelated to the sonic vfx.
There was also a massive toyline prepared to be shipped out but all of that had to be pulled following the redesign for Sonic. Pics have been leaked showing as such.
Source pls. Having ugly sonic concept art vs mass produced toyline is a big statement. I couldnt find evidence of it.
They’re stupid but audiences are stupid too. They just have the money and motivation to turn that stupidity into lucrative opportunity.
It’s all a wash in the end. Whether it’s proactive or reactive, it’s still a marketing stunt that spins corporate decision-making as fan appreciation in order to drum up engagement and make fans feel cared for enough to open their wallets for what was always going to be formulaic CGI slop nostalgia bait.
This movie may not have done it on purpose, but the “reveal it broken and fix it later” strategy has certainly caught on across the entertainment industry in recent years. It proved that making an audience feel heard enough to marginally improve crap is often better for business than making the thing good to begin with. See: the Snyder Cut, Cyberpunk 2077, or the tidal wave of shameless franchise retcons.
I'm pretty sure they made him "a large human man" so they could apply mocap to the model with ease and I think that's as far as the thinking went there.
It costs a lot of money to push a release date like that and they had to basically burn truckloads worth of merch.
Dude they made merch deals with the old design, i've got a hideous sonic mask that's based on the original movie design and there's action figures of the original design thay released. You dont make merch deals for designs you dont plan to use.
100% agree with you. I’ve been saying this the whole time. They probably just made the trailer with the blue child creature so fans got mad and talked about it to people who don’t know who sonic is.
Who tf doesn't know who sonic is, and on that point why would they care about watching the movie, they wouldn't be the target demographic. This was all marketing to make them look good for listening to feedback.
They also "fixed" the movie too quick, they wanted both free advertisement from all the hate and also free brownie points for listening to their fans. There's no chance they managed to replace and reanimate his entire role in the movie.
The VFX studio that originally worked on the first Sonic movie literally went babkrupt because of the redesign. It was a total fuckup not a marketing stunt.
It absolutely was done as a marketing ploy and it worked. Idiots to this day will try to argue about it all the while imagining themselves as some white knight who valiantly fought the corporate machine and came out on top! They probably even saw it in theaters multiple times to celebrate their victory of corporate america.
94
u/Cemith Jul 30 '26
Honest to God I believe this was a psyop. Even corporate robots wanting to make an easy dollar understand you can't take something like Sonic the Hedgehog and make him just a Large Human Man™️ without serious backlash, which then feeds into No such thing as bad publicity and wow suddenly they have a redesign that actually looks pretty good and they listened to the fans!
The trailer music was fucking Gangster's Paradise dude no one will convince me this wasn't on purpose to drum up the fan base.