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Sonic movie delayed to February 2020 so they can fix Sonic

Sonic movie delayed to February 2020 so they can fix Sonic

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Gotta go at a reasonable pace and avoid overtaxing your VFX team

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Paramount Pictures

The live-action Sonic the Hedgehog film is being delayed nearly three months to give the creative team more time to fix the CGI character after the widespread backlash to the original live-action design. It’ll now hit theaters on February 14th, 2020.

Director Jeff Fowler announced the new date on Twitter, a few weeks after he confirmed that the team would be redesigning Sonic following the initial debut of the design in the first trailer. Fowler’s tweet also included the hashtag “#novfxartistswereharmedinthemakingofthismovie,” hopefully to assuage fears that the visual effects teams would not be put through the wringer trying to fix the character in time for the original November release.

Whether or not three months extra is enough to fix the character is up in the air. As Detective Pikachu director Rob Letterman (whose own film featured similar CGI character) noted to The Verge when the redesign was first announced, “it would be very difficult for us to redesign anything. We spent a year designing all the characters ahead of shooting so that we could get it all right. If we were off by an inch on Pikachu, [actor] Justice Smith’s performance would go right out the window. For us, it would have been impossible — but that doesn’t mean they can’t do it. I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes — they’re in a difficult spot.”

Without a better look into the Sonic the Hedgehog process, it’s not clear whether there are similar challenges here, but it sounds like Fowler and his team will have plenty to keep them busy in the coming months.

To say that fans were unhappy with the design of Sonic in the first trailer is a bit of an understatement, with complaints about the character’s differences from the original games and uncannily realistic proportions, among other things. Here’s hoping that the studio’s second shot at the design is a little more friendly.