The Sonic the Hedgehog live-action film surprised many people, after a major character redesign led to a box office hit.
After the release of the first trailer, expectations for the film were extremely low. The title character, Sonic looked nothing like his video game counterpart. The studio made the choice to make the character more realistic. In doing this, Sonic was frightful to look at.
See image below:
This wasn’t the Sonic that you knew. This definitely wasn’t the Sonic you would support in theaters. The film looked dead in the water before it hit theaters.
Amid a rabid fanbase’s and social media backlash, the studio took a step back, and redesigned the character to appear more like he does in the games. This paid-off exponentially for the studio, as Sonic the Hedgehog garnered good reviews and became the most successful video game adaptation to date.
Sonic voice actor Ben Schwartz sat down with CinemaBlend to talk about the redesign controversy:
“The way that I saw it first I think was on the trailer. I had to do ADR for the actual trailer because up until then it was all very temp. But I believe the trailer had to be done very quickly or something like that.
So the first time I saw it was then. And then when it came out and the reaction it got when it came out. First of all we didn’t know if anyone would care. We care because we like video games and movies it seems.
But the biggest thing we learned from that was that when it came out so many people were so vocal and it became a huge thing. It got passed around so much.
t may have not been the most positive reason why it was getting passed around, but it got passed around so much and so people had such heartfelt passionate ideas for it. That the biggest thing we learned was ‘Oh, people care a lot. Let’s look at this and figure it out.’
The big thing they were trying to do was how do you bring Sonic into the real world? Because he’s a computer character, you can’t just bring him in. How will he look in a real life situation?
So, I think that’s what they were tackling. But I will say the new version… when I was doing my voice the whole time I was doing it the way the new version looks. In my head, that’s the way it looked.
So, when I saw the first one I was like ok, but when I saw the second one I was like ‘This is in my head what the little guy looks like.’”
Schwartz goes on to say that signing Jim Carrey was a big feat. He brought the Jim back from the early 1990s to great success. This is even at a time when most kids aren’t familiar with the actor.
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