Back in April, Paramount dropped the first trailer for the upcoming live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie and… good lord, it did not go over well. This was not the adorable, chili dog-fueled video game beast we all thought we knew. The movie’s Sonic was a strange, hyperreal CGI monstrosity even worse than Will Smith’s genie: His weird, furry face! His humanoid hands! His terrible, terrible Chiclet teeth! The backlash was so overwhelming that the studio decided to pull the movie and completely redesign Sonic. “The message is loud and clear,” director Jeff Fowler tweeted in May, “you aren’t happy with the design & you want changes. It’s going to happen.”
Well, now, six months later, it has actually happened. On Tuesday morning, Paramount re-released the Sonic trailer featuring the brand-new design and, uh, wait—somehow they actually did a pretty good job?
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The new Sonic has more exaggerated, cartoonish features—a smoother snout, bigger eyes, and, thankfully, slightly less terrifying teeth—and is hiding his fleshy, wrinkled hands under some classic Sonic gloves. He’s also better proportioned now, since the original Sonic was weirdly tall. That also means that those muscular, hairy legs are mercifully gone, too.
The frantic, last-minute character redesign seemed like a no-win situation back in May, but it seems like Paramount (and the team of animators who were presumably working tirelessly this whole time) somehow pulled it off. We’ll have to wait until Sonic the Hedgehog drops on February 14 to see if it holds together for the entire movie, though. Until then, give the new and improved trailer a watch above.
