April 30, 2019. A day that will live in hedgehog infamy. One that was anticipated by millions of gamers with visions of Dreamcast controllers and Chaos Emeralds in their heads but was instead marked by small humanoid eyes, distractingly flat teeth, and two words that would become a meme:
The initial trailer for Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” became one of the most widely disliked videos ever put forth by a Hollywood studio at a speed that would rival even that of the Fastest Thing Alive. YouTube videos, tweets and gaming media rants spread across the web in a matter of hours, denouncing the film as the latest example of why, in a pre-“Detective Pikachu” world, gamers did not trust Hollywood to do right by the characters and worlds that they love.
For the film’s director, Jeff Fowler, there was only one thing to do: win back that trust, and do it fast.
“The fans needed to know that they were being heard, and they needed to hear that from me,” Fowler said about a tweet he sent out just two days after the trailer was released: “The message is loud and clear… you aren’t happy with the design & you want changes. It’s going to happen.”
2,059 days after sending that tweet, those gamers are now frothing with excitement for “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” a film that is likely to be Paramount’s highest-grossing release in 2024 and is the latest in a growing wave of hit video game movies that have steadily taken control of the cineplex zeitgeist in the 2020s.
How big is the excitement? Paramount had the guts to put out an “Ugly Sonic Christmas sweater” as a giveaway to promote “Sonic 3,” and the fan response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Fowler sees the fact that fans can look back and laugh and even embrace “Ugly Sonic” as a sign that he was successful in building the culture of trust surrounding this still-rising movie series. That trust is not just with the audience, but also with Paramount and within the filmmaking team, many of which have stuck together for the trilogy and the “Knuckles” Paramount+ spinoff series.
And it is that trust that has allowed Fowler to not only navigate the redesign of Sonic, but to shoot two sequels in the face of the pandemic and strikes that have set the entire film industry on its head.
“I’ve worked on dozens of films. It’s rare to be so excited to work on a film the way I am with ‘Sonic,’” series producer Neal Moritz, whose work also includes the “Fast & Furious” films and “21 Jump Street,” told TheWrap. “There is a love for this world and these characters that is in every shot, and I credit that to Jeff, who is not just incredibly hard working but kind as well.”
Here’s the inside story of how the adaptation went from laughing stock to a franchise that’s made over $720 million at the worldwide box office and counting.
Extreme Makeover: Hedgehog Edition
If there was any silver lining for Fowler about that initial trailer, it was that everyone connected to “Sonic,” from Paramount to Sega to producer Neal Moritz at Original Film, was immediately onboard with plans for a redesign.
“There was no ‘let’s wait and see’ from anyone. It was clear what had to be done,” he said. “Paramount moved back the release from November [2019] to February [2020], which gave us the time we needed because there was a lot of work to do.”
“We got in a room with every executive at Paramount and told them how long it would take to do the fix and how much it would cost, and they immediately said ‘OK, go do it,’” added Moritz.
The “Ugly Sonic” design had been the result of Fowler and his team, which included VFX supervisor Ged Wright, trying to figure out how to translate a cartoony hedgehog widely regarded as having one of the most iconic designs ever for a video game character into a real-world environment where he would feel like a tangible being alongside human characters like Jim Carrey’s Dr. Eggman.
“We ended up going too far into realism, and the fans rightly called us out on that,” Fowler said.
As Fowler and Wright met directly with the VFX team in Vancouver, they brought in a Sonic expert: Tyson Hesse. The illustrator and animator had spent the last few years delighting fans of the series with animated trailers and shorts for the retro game “Sonic Mania,” and continues to produce such shorts for Sega while working as a creative adviser on the films. Fowler also got in touch with Sonic Team in Japan, including the games’ longtime lead designer Takashi Iizuka.
Hesse provided the “Sonic” VFX workers with the Rosetta Stone, pulling on his years of drawing the blue hedgehog to find the happy medium that Fowler was looking for. Some of the changes from “Ugly Sonic” were kept, such as blue fur on the arms instead of tan fur and two separate eyes instead of the signature “mono-eye” look of Sega’s Sonic to allow for easier expressiveness when animating.
“What’s so great about Tyson is that he can take an abstract conversation and put a visual on it with his skills as an illustrator,” Fowler said. “He turns words into a drawing, and that drawing then becomes a blueprint for our asset team. There were all sorts of talks about what this photorealistic Sonic should look like, and even now, not everyone agrees with what we settled on. But we got the essentials right because Tyson just has such a grasp on who this character is.”
When “Sonic the Hedgehog” opened in February 2020, it got off to a solid $58 million opening weekend, with the general consensus among fans being that it was an enjoyable ride if not exactly filled with the references to the games that they hoped. It seemed on its way to a $400 million-plus run at the box office… until the pandemic shut the world down.
Gotta Mask Fast
As the world moved into quarantine in early summer 2020, Paramount announced that “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” was greenlit. It would be another four months after that announcement that Hollywood studios and unions rolled out to a nervous industry its Return to Work safety protocols, complete with COVID-19 safety officers, production zones to ensure social distancing and changes to a wide variety of departments from catering to hair & makeup trailers.
When asked about his recollections of that time, Moritz seemed reluctant to pull them out of the memory hole he had stashed them in.
“It feels like ancient history at this point,” he said. “I love being on set, but I hated it during COVID. A lot of the social aspect of it got taken out. Still, we were lucky to be even shooting a movie at that point.”
While Moritz worked with Paramount to get the new COVID-19 logistics set up, Fowler decided to use the extra time stuck in quarantine as an opportunity for better preparation, ensuring that storyboards and animatics were set up for every scene of a sequel that would have not one but three CGI characters in Sonic, Tails and Knuckles.
The extensive pre-viz work also took the load off of a VFX department that had a lot more to worry about this time than an abrupt redesign. The ecosystem of VFX vendors that do work for Hollywood’s biggest films was slammed by mass layoffs during the pandemic, and those that remained were overwhelmed by a glut of productions that had gone on pause when the world shut down.
“With the first film, we would pre-viz a big scene involving Sonic like the bullet time scene at the roadhouse, but with Tails and Knuckles involved there were a lot more animatics that we needed to prep so that everyone could have a sense of the flow and the pacing and the comedy and the action of every scene by the time we started shooting,” Fowler said.
When that shooting did start in Vancouver in March 2021, Fowler and Moritz say there was a mix of difficult adjustment to the COVID safety protocols and a sense of relief of being able to shoot a movie again after nearly a year stuck indoors. Everyone had to learn how to do their jobs in more restrictive conditions, especially Jim Carrey, who like many comedic actors would work off the response he’s getting from the director and the crew watching him to see if his performance was getting the laughs required.
It was over the course of shooting “Sonic 2” that Fowler learned the value of “laughing with his eyes,” trying to communicate to Carrey and other live-action members of the cast like Lee Majdoub and James Marsden that they had landed on the right take. In the long run, he believes that the challenge of directing with an N95 mask and face shield on helped him become a better director.
“By the time Jim and I were shooting ‘Sonic 3,’ I just think we were so relieved to go back to a normal way of filmmaking, but having that non-verbal form of communication built up from ‘Sonic 2’ just made it so much easier for us to instinctively know the third time around when we got a scene just right,” he said.
Shadow and the Strike
That system of efficiency proved useful once again in 2023 as Fowler, Moritz and producer Toby Ascher developed “Sonic 3” alongside “Knuckles,” the six-episode Paramount+ series that put Idris Elba’s echidna front and center.
“Knuckles” was in post-production when SAG-AFTRA went on strike in July, and the “Sonic” team decided to focus on that in the early weeks of the 118-day work stoppage.
As for “Sonic 3,” Fowler once again called on his heavy pre-viz philosophy, particularly on Sonic and Shadow’s battles in a soundstage-shot and digitally extended Tokyo and on the surface of the Moon in the third act. Meanwhile, Moritz and Ascher tried to keep things flexible when it came to location shooting in London.
“The most live-action actor-heavy sequence in the film is a daytime sequence in London that takes place in the summer,” Ascher said, referencing a scene where James Marsden and Tika Sumpter’s Tom and Maddie help Sonic and pals with a “Mission: Impossible”-esque heist job via hologram disguises that brought co-stars Shemar Moore and Natasha Rothwell onto the call sheet.
“As the start date for shooting pushed into the fall and then into the winter and the trees got bare, we had to constantly change our plans,” Ascher continued. “I think during that strike period, we had a new schedule every week, constantly coming up with contingency plans in case the strike didn’t end by a certain date so we could do our exterior shots and meet our release date.”
But that release date was met, and now “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” is in theaters with the best reviews of the series so far and high expectations that it will pass the $405 million box office total of “Sonic 2.” A fourth installment is already in early development for a 2027 release, and suddenly a film that could have bombed in 2019 has the potential to last as long as Moritz’s “Fast & Furious” franchise.
Perhaps this time around, as he gives more of Sonic’s friends and foes the big screen treatment, Fowler, Moritz and Ascher won’t have to worry about working around another industry upheaval. But even if they do, Fowler feels confident that his team can take it on.
“I think it’s a little funny that the work that we’ve done really reflects the message of these films: when you’ve got the right people by your side, and you’re willing to listen to each other and complement each other’s strengths, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.”
