By now you’ve probably seen the cursed two minutes and 46 seconds of footage that make up the first trailer for the live action Sonic The Hedgehog movie. It really is quite a ride.
SEGA and Paramount Pictures announced their intentions to release a feature film starring the blue blur a few years ago, and now we’ve all seen the horrifying reality, I’m not at all convinced it’s going to buck the “video game movies are naff” trend that Detective Pikachu apparently manages to avoid.
If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, I’d recommend watching it below just to get up to speed with the rest of us. That dull sensation in the pit of your stomach is perfectly normal, don’t worry.
Would you believe that the internet has opinions on the Sonic trailer, and that they are not good ones? I know, I was shocked too. For a few hours, I thought it was just my Twitter bubble that were going in on Sonic’s latest adventure, but a quick glance at the trailer uploaded to Paramount’s official YouTube channel confirmed my worst fears.
At the time of writing, the Sonic trailer has nearly 12 million views, with 166K likes to 254K dislikes. It’s by no means the most disliked video to ever have graced YouTube, but it’s not a great sign for a first trailer, is it?
Comments under the video complain of Sonic’s weirdly lifelike, charmless, muscular design, the fact that nobody involved with the film seems to have learned anything from past video game movies, and the trailer’s use of Gangsta’s Paradise.
There was at least some praise for Jim Carrey’s Dr “Eggman” Robotnik, who looks like a genuinely fun addition to the movie, and the most “Jim Carrey” Jim Carrey has been in years.
But what did Twitter have to say? Brace yourselves…
Others meanwhile, simply offered suggestions as to how SEGA and Paramount could (and probably should) have rendered Sonic. Nobody wants the frightened muscular toddler in a onesie that we’ve ended up with, after all.
Sonic The Hedgehog hits cinemas on November 8. While SEGA has clearly made a horrible first impression here, I don’t want to completely rule out the film being awful based on the brief look we’ve had so far.
If nothing else, I reckon it’ll be a box office smash based on the amount of people who show up just to experience what a train wreck it could potentially be.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.