In May of this year, Paramount Pictures posted a trailer for its upcoming movie Sonic The Hedgehog. The trailer was met with the rage of millions of fans. This was quite a shock to the studio, which thought it had everything together. It had a movie with adventure, action, silly but not rude humor for kids, and even some edgy humor for the dads of the kids. So, what happened? Sadly, it’s hard for people to tolerate a film when they can’t tolerate the look of the title character.

Hollywood has been going crazy with video game adaptations ever since movies like Mortal Kombat and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were released and proved to be highly profitable. At first, the films had to be more grounded in reality, but that began to change when CGI (Computer Generated Image) became an option. Now, even more video game adaptations are possible, so studios are taking advantage of it. A Sonic movie was just waiting to happen, and how could it not? A popular video game character who is a hedgehog/alien and who has super speed and is pursued by a wacky villain. Easy money. But there was the challenge of actually making this video game character realistic. There was the method done with the film Detective Pikachu, in which the cartoon Pokemon were made with CGI, but nothing was done to humanize them and an artist was able to properly blend them into the real world. For Sonic, the studio decided to try and humanize this character. This included making him taller, giving him human eyes and oddly straight teeth, and making his gloves into white fur. This would be okay if Sonic already looked like this and wasn’t as popular, but he didn’t and he was, and because of this single decision, everyone on the Internet went wild.

When people got a silhouette of the character, they started to worry. When people saw a concept design, even more people worried. And when the trailer came out showing the full look of this character, almost every person who saw it detested it. In a sense, it didn’t at all look like the character they loved. This caused widespread Internet memes and blatant hatred of the film. Many said this design freaked them out. Some even wondered if this was all just one big joke. The movie seemed like it’d be a nice kid’s movie but with this supposedly horrific design, yet no one could bear to gaze upon this live action Sonic. The studio then decided that it had to redesign this character.

This redesign was pretty significant because this was one of the first times that a studio actually heeded criticism from Internet trolls and actually worked to fix it. With this redesign, the film’s release date had to be pushed to February 14th (so now you can take your partner to see Sonic the Hedgehog on Valentine’s Day). Fans were greatly anticipating this redesign. They were hoping that maybe their beloved character would actually look like the original. Then, on November 12th, fans got a second trailer. This one featured both new and old footage but now with this newly improved Sonic. Now, I’m not very opinionated, but I find this design to be a lot better than the first. Sure, it’s just the look of a character, but I feel that it gives the character a closer resemblance to the original, and it is good enough to satisfy the fans of the games.

Now there’s nothing to worry about except if the movie will be enjoyable or not.