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The ONE Lesson We Can Learn From The Sonic Saga
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Mar 31, 2025
For many, when the original trailer for Sonic the Hedgehog premiered, Sonic seemed like he was designed from someone's nightmares. The internet exploded with harsh criticism over Sonic's almost human-hybrid design. The studio heard the fan's complaints and went into a total redesign before the final film was released. Fans were much happier with the new version of Sonic the Hedgehog.
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Meow
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This was wrong in almost every way. This was a film and animation studio
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that took an established design and created a reduction that took away all of the cute and all the cool
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and created an almost terrifying version of an instantly recognizable figure. The Sonic movie has somehow become at once
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the biggest, most public failure in modern film history and also one of the greatest media redemption stories
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of the past decade. There is literally nothing else like it. Movies that receive a seemingly unfettered amount of negative attention from the moment they're revealed rarely, if ever, recover
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But I guess rules don't apply to this guy because this is pure, unfiltered, accidental genius
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Sonic is not some random video game character. Sonic is a near-cultural ubiquity
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He, like Homer or SpongeBob, is so instantly recognizable that a mere shape or silhouette is all that's needed
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for most people to identify the character. And this version of Sonic was a failure in every way
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And weirdly, it was one of Sega's executives that predicted almost two decades earlier
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that something like this would happen. A Sonic movie adaptation began production
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way back in 1994 at MGM. Sonic the Hedgehog, Wonders of the World
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It was a film that was supposed to come out not long after the infamous Super Mario movie
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That movie from 1994 is essentially what today's movie became. It had a very rocky production, eventually making its way to DreamWorks before finally being cancelled entirely
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And then five years ago, the process repeated itself. The movie rights to Sonic will be picked up by Sony in 2014
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and four years later, the film would basically be scrapped and handed to Paramount
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After a process of turnaround as the studio put it who alongside five animation and effects houses would create this monstrosity A realistic Sonic as they put it by using Ted as a reference point for
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applying an animated character into a real life space. People did not respond well
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And then something kind of crazy happened. This disaster became international news
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There's been a lot of controversy about the Sonic character. When the first trailer for
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this movie came out earlier this year. Did you know this? The internet freaked out
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The world's entertainment media picked up this story and ran with it. Sonic the Hedgehog would
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become a trending topic on Twitter almost a dozen times over the course of a single month. It wasn't
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just fans that were talking about this. It was everyone who had ever touched a Sonic game or
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watched a Sonic cartoon or read a Sonic comic or simply wanted to be in the conversation
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It was gamers. It was movie fans, comic fans. It was everyone. And this wasn't really a
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debate. This meme would make its way across the web, and there was a surprising and very rare
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consensus amongst the entire internet. This didn't work. Despite a few conspiracies, it probably
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wasn't intentional. People didn't spend hundreds of hours working on something, sinking millions into a design only so the world over could despise it. This was a giant mistake
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It wasn't on purpose, but for once, there was a positive light hiding underneath the negativity
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People were fixing it. They were changing the design. There became this passion for making it better, and they were sharing that passion
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It became a group project for the entire internet to take part in. Suddenly, the Sonic movie was this weird collaborative fixer-upper
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Images were being shared. New designs would be trending, and it created this strange community
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But this is where most stories like this take a wrong turn. Studios pick release dates for a reason and delaying a film can cost them millions of dollars In reshooting or reanimating a film is equally expensive and time So most studios would let it live and hope the negativity might actually drive some ticket sales
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You know, watching a movie out of resentment, I guess. Yet this trailer accidentally created
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the greatest marketing opportunity in film history. I'm wet. I'm cold. There's a fish on my head
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and clearly I'm not going to be able to do this on my own
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Very rarely does a film, which is a one-off piece of entertainment to begin with
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ever have a chance to make its fans, of which before release there are rarely any
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feel like they helped shape or mold the movie. You rarely get an opportunity to create a marketing pitch
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that your ticket buyers genuinely feel like they were a part of
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This was a mistake, an accident, but the genius that followed was calculated
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Paramount delayed the film from its holiday November release date to a much less favorable Valentine's Day release
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a period of time in which blockbuster films rarely hit theaters, but the one day of the year when seats might still be full in slower seasons
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And then they came out and publicly admitted that this didn't work at all. They spoke directly to their fans, to the web that had enveloped their message
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and said, we messed up and we know it's going to cost us money, but we're going to fix this
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Not for us, but for you. They actually bit the bullet, and to the surprise of basically everyone committed to righting
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the wrong. But how practical was that? See you've accidentally created a microscope, pointed directly at your film in a way that
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almost no other film ever has. You accidentally built a marketing campaign that put your movie in front of eyes that
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probably never would have otherwise seen it. Now it has to not suck
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But please McCaffrey, go on about how amazing I am. Paramount brought in Tyson Hess, illustrator and artist for Sonic comic adaptations
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They handed Marza Animation Planet the job and sunk million into redesigning the character They enlarged and redesigned his eyes to make them more cartoony and more in line
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with his actual design. They redesigned and fixed his shoes and gloves. And most importantly, they redesigned
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Sonic's humanoid body into a much more recognizable contour that actually resembled Sonic's shape and body form
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So now the studio could confidently say that he no longer looked like Ace Ventura in a Sonic
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Halloween costume. And then they re-marketed the movie from scratch, almost as to reintroduce it
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They actually learned from their other marketing mistakes as well. They showed more of Jim Carrey's Robotnik
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They left some of the cringe on the table and introduced more humor in their trailers
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And then they introduced the world to a completed film that was actually quite good
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A film that would make hundreds of millions of dollars that would engender actual goodwill
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and a film that should feasibly spawn a franchise. There's really no way to intentionally recreate the accidental genius of Paramount's Sonic
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movie rollout. They couldn't have known that their catastrophic mistake would lead to the creation of a community
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to a trending rallying cry across the web. They could not have known that one trailer would ignite the love and public acknowledgement
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of a franchise and a mascot that no longer tops public interest
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But once they did, they managed to play the internet in a way we rarely see marketing companies successfully do
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They took mass negativity and acknowledged it. Played the role of a friend, they accepted the intervention and fixed their problem for the sake of their loved ones
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Well, for lack of a better ogy. The accidental genius of the Sonic movie made them more money than we'll ever know
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It likely renewed interest in the games, future games, future films, comics
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The blue blur is back, even if it was a rocky road and honestly he's in pretty good shape
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