Nothing here is an exact fact, but video game movies are going to start rising after the release of Detective Pikachu. With that being the movie to beat, Paramount Pictures released the teaser for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie. By just going on social media you can see the various complaints they got for creating the film.
(Photo by Paramount Pictures’ YouTube)
After the movie started trending on various websites for the horrendous design, a statement by director Jeff Fowler was released on Twitter. Fowler said, “Thank you for the support. And the criticism. The message is loud and clear… you aren’t happy with the design & you want changes. It’s going to happen. Everyone at Paramount & Sega are fully committed to making this character the BEST he can be… #sonicmovie #gottafixfast .”
As a fan, you are relieved But once you really start to think about it, you think about the animators and creative team and how they’re going to have to go back and fix all the parts of the movie that they have already made. You start to wonder how many hours they’ve wasted.
But then you also think, “There’s absolutely no way they released this design without knowing that it was bad.”
Because that was the purpose. As I said before, it’s hard to come in hot with a lot of other big movies being advertised at the moment, so by creating a deliberately horrible design, the trailer shocked fans and got free publicity from the outrage. All the memes and redesigns by artists got them the attention they wanted and now they want viewers to believe that they are going to give us what we want by redesigning the character.
(Photo courtesy of MovieWeb)
A scenario like this would be called outrage marketing, and it has been done by various companies over the years in order to get people to talk about what they’re selling.
However, I could be wrong. The people at Paramount Pictures really saw absolutely nothing wrong with their “original” design, and they’re going to remake everything they’ve done so far. But I myself believe that this was a marketing strategy, and it worked.