So the director of the Sonic the Hedgehog movie made a public announcement that his team will now be working to change Sonic’s design and improve it, after the huge backlash from fans. Curiously, there’s been no mention of the movie’s release date being pushed back, despite the process of re-animating and filming entire scenes with a new character model being an enormously time-consuming and costly thing to be done to an already finished film.
…..This has me feeling a bit suspicious.
-puts on tinfoil hat-
Hear me out. What if the whole trailer (and Sonic’s design) was deliberately manufactured to be as strange and off-putting as possible? All the fan outrage, the discussion on social media, the redesigns by various artists, the memes…it’s all been free publicity. What if Paramount stirred it all up on purpose, with a deliberately bad design?
And now, for the next bold, calculated move…..the director is pretending to be very concerned with fan backlash. He’s pretending that they’ll work on the movie, cost be damned, because they really care about giving the fans what they want. So kind. So thoughtful.
Horseapples, I say! There will be no new changes to the movie! Because the real movie, with the real Sonic design, has already been made. And we already got a peek at it in the promotional art.
(that’s the real Sonic design, folks. It’s been all along! >:O)
Now am I saying this has all been a very elaborate and convoluted scheme by Paramount to get more butts in theaters to see a movie about a fast blue rat? Especially in the wake of fellow video game movie Detective Pikachu, a film that will inevitably make absurd amounts of money, and potentially raise the bar for expected quality/accuracy in video game movies? Yes. Yes I am.
-adjusts tinfoil hat-
It’s called outrage marketing, and it works really, really well on generations that have otherwise grown pretty numb to traditional marketing tactics. This is because, to put it simply, we really enjoy being pissed off at things together. It’s like all we have in common, sometimes. And marketing teams, being comprised of soulless vampires, have realized that this gets a ton of free publicity, because everyone needs to have an opinion or just be left out of the conversation.
Gillette did this, Pepsi did this, BK’s trying to do it right now by commodifying mental illness into their weird un-happy meals, it’s very much a thing.
If this movie drops and there’s not an expose on the shit working conditions of the artists who had to crunch like hell to basically re-animate an entire movie in a handful of months, then this is in fact almost definitely what is happening now.
They make us mad on purpose so we get talking about it, and then they attempt to address or “fix” whatever’s wrong to get us talking again. We don’t click ads anymore, but we do this very reliably.
I’m just saying, there is NO WAY Sega approved this trailer’s design. It is almost deliberately designed to be off-putting imo.