Sonic has the right to look better for his first movie.
Paramount has delayed the Sonic the Hedgehog movie from November 8 this year to February 14,2020. This is so the animation team has time to redesign Sonic’s look following backlash from the film’s first trailer, which featured an oddly realistic take on iconic Sega character.
As a Sonic fan since my early childhood, I’m glad this fix is happening. But a lot of people don’t share my sentiment. I see colleagues and friends on places like Twitter saying that this is another example of “whiny fans” throwing a tantrum and getting their way, making unfair work for artists that are forced to abandon their original vision.
This perspective in part comes from our experience with video games, where we’ve seen things like Mass Effect 3’s entire ending change after backlash from fans. We’re also becoming concerned (rightly) about the amount of crunch happening in game development. We’re hearing stories about stressful and unhealthy working conditions at studios like Rockstar Games and BioWare.
But the idea that this change will resulting visual effects crunch was always an assumption. Sonic’s design change for the movie was announced weeks before the film delay. At that point, the idea that this would result in crunch at visual effects studios seemed plausible. But it always felt more likely that the movie would be delayed, and now that’s exactly what has happened. That could give the FX artists time to implement the new Sonic in the film without working extra hours.
I don’t know how this change will impact the working conditions of film people. I’m not a movie person, that’s not my field. It is my understanding that visual effects are one of the few sectors of Hollywood that is not unionized, so those artists do not enjoy the same protections as actors or other on-set workers. That’s a good reason for people to feel anxious about all this in the first place.
Director Jeff Fowler is aware of all this. He addressed these concerns directly in his tweet announcing the delay, including a hashtag that reads “no FX artists were harmed in the making in this movie.”
That’s not exactly a legally binding promise, but it’s something.
