Sonic the Hedgehog movie redesign cost $5 million, suggests report

Still a chunk o’ change

In the wake of the new-and-improved Sonic the Hedgehog movie trailer, featuring the freshly-redesigned Blue Blur, there has been talk of how much cash it might have cost the production company to re-sculpt the little fella.

A since-deleted tweet by user TRAFON claimed that the redesign cost production $35 million USD. This went viral, despite there being little evidence that this was anything more than a rough guess. Since then, Indiewire has been in contact with “a source close to production”, who informed them that the number was in the region of $5 million USD – still an insane amount of money to you or I, but likely a drop in the ocean for Paramount Pictures.

The same source also notes that the only completed footage of Nightmare Sonic that existed was used in the trailer itself. Thus, the team only needed to fix those specific scenes, with Nu-Sonic being freshly created for the remainder of the movie. Hopefully this statement proves to be true, as it would mean that a lot less stress was thrust upon the visual effects team, who would otherwise have had to replace almost every digital shot in a 100-minute movie.

Of course, there is no official word on any of this – this is just an unnamed source after all – but it would be comforting to hear that the redesign did not cause severe pressure on the tireless crew, a factor which obviously matters far more than how much dollar one of the world’s biggest production companies was required to shell out.

Sonic the Hedgehog opens in theatres February 14, 2020.

Sonic redesign cost Paramount no way near $35 million [IndieWire / Screen Rant]