Thread by @Coelasquid

Galaxy brain theory: If the sonic in the final version of the movie looks different from what we've been shown in the trailer, it's a change they started making months ago when people reacted poorly to the poster and early "leaks" of the design.

And if that is the case, the trailer we saw was mostly a publicity stunt to make people buzz about it on every social media platform before they announced they'd be changing it.

Basically, here's why it seems fishy; If a studio like paramount wants to hire a VFX house, they put out a bid for the project. This is where most of the work deciding how ragged you're going to run your animators happen, with VFX houses underbidding each other for the contract.

I've been told by producers that animation houses tend to operate on 2-3% margins, with this race of underbidding the competition but still being able to pay your employees to do the job. This is why places like Rhythm and Hues go under working on award wining blockbusters

When a production house picks a studio, they draw up a contract that'll have clauses in it for things like how many rounds of revisions the company is allowed to ask for before they have to pay more, how many times the studio is allowed to renegotiate if they need more money, etc

If the company financing the project breaks the contract in some obvious way, like surprise redesigning the main character 11 months from release, they would have to renegotiate. But in this case, the VFX house would have the upper hand, because they already have the contract.

The studio at the top could pay a kill fee for breaking the contract and take the project somewhere else if they don't like the terms they're being offered, but then they're in the position of having to find a new studio, already at a disadvantage b/c of the time frame.

How willing a studio is to bend over backwards and not make the producers pay out the nose for a request like this usually relates to how much they depend on using this project as a stepping stone for good business relationships. Work for exposure, basically.

I'm not sure who exactly is doing the VFX on this, but I heard it was ILM and Blur? Both of those studios are pretty well established. ILM CERTAINLY doesn't depend on the Sonic the Hedgehog movie as a stepping stone to bigger, better things.

So if Paramount is truly making a last minute spur-of-the-moment decision to reanimate the entire movie by November, the VFX guys would theoretically have them in a position to ask for basically anything they want, because Paramount fucked up the contract by asking for this

And the only reason Paramount would have to do that is if they think the amount of extra money they'll make by changing it is worth the cost of reanimating the movie. Execs normally don't care about that kind of thing, because they bank on people watching it either way.

So either Paramount is willing to absolutely pay out the nose for this thing, the VFX place is going to go bankrupt before they even finish anyway because they can't pay their employees, the design change was planned earlier on, or they aren't planning to change anything.

(Or, you know, some other wild card option like "sonic is only in 10 minutes of the movie" or "Sonic comes from a cartoon style world where everyone has classic toony designs and they only had a handful of live action scenes where he looked like that")

Apparently some folks are under the impression I’m saying this is absolutely what’s happening right now, which is not the case, I’m saying in a hypothetical world where a Sonic movie comes out in November with a completely different character design, something else was likely up.

Because I’m seeing quite a few assumptions that they’re going to reanimate every scene with Sonic at no additional cost by just “making everyone work harder” and that just wouldn’t be possible without spending a lot of money on a lot of extra employees to absorb a lot of work.