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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Korked Bats

That Funny Sports Blog

We All Need To See ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ In Theaters, And This Is Why

In case you’ve been living under a rock and/or been stuck trying to defeat Dr. Eggman in The Green Hill Zone Act 3, Sonic The Hedgehog hits theaters today. The real-life movie adapted from the popular SEGA video game.

Whether this film interests you or not, you need to, and I cannot stress this enough, see it in theaters.

I haven’t seen it (but plan to). I’m not being paid to write this (I wish). It could very well be the worst movie ever made (actually, no – that will still be reserved for The Terminal). I’m simply saying we all NEED to see it in theaters.

Why?

This is arguably the first time in the history of cinema a movie studio dropped an initial trailer for a movie, saw the backlash it received on the internet, bit the bullet, swallowed their pride, and dropped millions of dollars to change/correct it.

When the original Sonic The Hedgehog trailer dropped last May, we were all terrified. The Sonic they digitally animated looked more human than hedgehog. Not that Sonic looks like a hedgehog to begin with, but you get what I’m saying. He had small eyes. He had human teeth. The freaking thing wasn’t even wearing gloves. And all of us were clamoring hashtag NOT MY SONIC.

This would’ve been like if they made Crash Bandicoot with a shirt on, gave Pacman human teeth, or casted someone with a small cup size to play Lara Croft from Tomb Rai—oh wait, that happened. I’m sorry, I love Alicia Virkander. She’s a top-3 celebrity crush for me, but casting her as this??

Image result for lara croft alicia vikander video game

Naturally, there was an uproar on the internet. Shocker, I know. Sonic was trending for a while. Probably longer than anyone ever imagined. And not to go all Buzzfeed headline on you, but what happened next may shock you. Instead of Paramount sticking their cosmetically-fixed Hollywood noses in the air and chalking this up as, “Any publicity is good publicity,” they whipped out their check book and recreated damn-near the entire film.

This wasn’t Robert Zemekis and Bob Gale reshooting Back to the Future with Michael J. Fox on nights and weekends after initially shooting with Eric Stultz. This required hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of man power to essentially redesign every still in the movie with a new Sonic. A Sonic we all grew up with.

This video does a good job of showing both the original and the new trailer with the changes.

There was a rumor early on that this kind of redesign cost Paramount $35 million and brought the film’s overall budget to $125 million. Paramount has since denounced those claims saying it cost merely $5 million to reanimate. I imagine Paramount was lowballing a bit just to save face, but regardless, it cost a lot of money to do this. Plus, the original film was slated to drop November 8th, but with the changes, they were forced to push it back to Valentine’s Day weekend 2020. It’s a shame too, because they just missed out on that 2019 Best Picture Oscar nom. Always next year, I guess?

I should add that the newer version looks phenomenal.

Trust me, no one in Hollywood EVER looks this good after cosmetic surgery.

Will this movie be good? I have a feeling it will be, at very least, decent. Mainly because the cast is solid. Jim Carrey (as Dr. Eggman) and James Marsden with Ben Schwartz voicing Sonic? Those three are good enough alone to entertain for the 1 hour and 39 minute runtime. At the time of writing this, it was scoring very well on Rotten Tomatoes. 63% with critics with a shocking 96% audience score.

However, even if the movie sucks worse than The Terminal (it won’t), we should still support it. Because they put a lot of money to make a movie more towards our liking, but also because it’s not The Terminal.

We need to reward what they did and show them that sometimes it is good to listen to the masses. Not always, but sometimes. I’m not saying producers should be scouring Twitter for every “WTF IS THAT?!” tweet in regards to new trailers, but it sure would’ve helped the people who made CATS.

Hell, imagine if Star Wars: The Phantom Menace did this. We probably never would’ve gotten Jar-Jar Binks and Americans wouldn’t be so pissed off all the time these days.

You might argue, “Well, they should’ve made Sonic look good to begin with,” which I completely agree with. However, they people who made this are human. Kind of like the original Sonic was. Then they fixed their mistake, and we should support them for doing so, instead of just ruining our childhood memories of that speedy hedgehog (who looks nothing like an actual hedgehog).

Also, while we’re on the subject of video game movies, when are we getting a Crazy Taxi movie?

Austin

Austin hosts a country music morning radio show in Chicago after nearly a decade in sports talk radio (The Jim Rome Show, Steve Gorman SPORTS!) Colin Cowherd and Smash Mouth follow him on Twitter and he wears pants every day.

Austin

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