Sonic Question

Does everyone remember the original Sonic trailer and how creepy he looked and the negative fan reaction?

The one on the left is the original design and the one on the right is more comics....I mean video game accurate.

Well the Director certainly did and boy oh boy is this an improvement.


Now my question is:

Should a creator stick to his vision and produce his project even if everyone hates it or should he actually listen to fans and produce something people actually want to watch?
And PAY for.

Of course a major motion picture is made by committee.
How many eyes saw that first version and just rubber stamped it we will never know.

I've said many times, if he is doing it for himself, then he should do whatever he wants.

If he is making it as "product" to "sell", he needs to make what audiences want to see.

It really is as simple as that for me

And kudos to him (and the studio) for going back and changing the look of Sonic.  A vast improvement imo.

Just my thoughts

Peace.

/K

An artist needs to match his vision to his audience if he intends to make a career out of it. If he doesn't care about money, he can make fan art. As soon as he is making a product he intends to sell, he needs to make a product that will actually sell. If the audience cannot share, or even appreciate, your vision, you are going to have a financial flop, which may well torpedo any attempts in the future to fund projects where your vision actually would be able to find an audience.

Markiehoe wrote:
Now my question is:

Should a creator stick to his vision and produce his project even if everyone hates it or should he actually listen to fans and produce something people actually want to watch?
And PAY for.

There is no simple answer to this.  because it's "of course they should" but also "you still need to ignore things and make what you need to make".

For one, no one ever saw the origianl, just some trailer footage and people lost their minds.  In this specific case, likely the response did indicate that the vision should be changed to more what people wanted....

but you have to be careful about this.

For instance Steve Jobs is famous for saying that people don't know what they want.   He would do things like remove the floppy drive from the first iMac -- and yes some people lost their minds over it.  USB Floppy drives were produced and sold ... but for all the drama, it ended up ... people didn't need floppy disks any more.

But you wouldn't have known this to listen to them or reviewers at the time!  So the result is if the vision had changed to what people _thought_ they wanted, an inferior product would have been made.

Similarly, tabets had been out for decades and the response was "yawn".  The first iPad outsold all 20 years of Windows Tablets in a very short time.  No one was asking for an iPad and probably if told about one, the response would have been underwhelming.

Sure theose are engineering examples, but I'm pretty sure that when making large creative products you can give people the nice safe, happy answer -- or you can take a risk and make something that people might not know they want.

The big trick is then getting people to stop long enough to give it a try.

But I'm also pretty sure that just about everything that is great involved creators sticking to a vision instead of a comittee/polling/etc.  (Also: limits are really important to.)

You have to make sure that you aren't stabbing your entire effort by dieing on a hill that isn't important to your work but is important to your audience, while at the same time not merely pandering to your audience by numbers.

You SHOULD take some effort to understand your audience.

Though often, I laugh  at geeks because they're upset that something wasn't made for them ... and it literally WAS NOT MADE FOR THEM, they just don't get it.  They harp on the topic and get upset, like the hoopla over Netflix's She-Ra.  It must be doing ok, I just saw more of them were released.  I see lots of fans of the show too. The creators got tarred with the brush above "Not listening to the fans!" when they WERE, just to a different set of them.

A very well thought out answer and trust me i do appreciate innovators and "Outside the Box" thinkers.
About your Apple examples,
I remember the days when people paid out the nose on new innovations then had to deal with bugs and patches just to get anything that came close to working.
When all they really wanted was a machine that could do what was promised the last generation.
I remember the Apple III overheating and melting it's own chips and boards in the box.
There was an Apple laptop that used to catch on fire on the assembly line.

What my original point was the fans wanted a Sonic movie.
What it looked like we were going to get was a horror show and the fans spoke up.
The creators listened and now it looks like they might have a hit on their hands.
Sometimes the fans were right.

And sometimes the fans are wrong.
Heath Ledger's Joker is a great example

Markiehoe wrote: And sometimes the fans are wrong.
Heath Ledger's Joker is a great example

I remember back in they day I went HUGH JACKMAN AS WOLVERINE?  Look the dude is way too tall!  Doesn’t have the build... and he’s Australian!

Then I saw X-Men and went “I’m an idiot”.  So, now I get to opine on casting decisions, but I always really hold off until more than just snippets from a trailer are seen ... that is until we get to see full scenes.

Really it’s listening to the fans to hear what they say, why they say it, and what they’re saying it about.   Then figure out if you should just ignore them.

For casting decisions they’re expressing an opinion w/o any real data — so it’s crap.  Theoretically the people making the call have seen screen tests, make up tests, etc.

Sonic was looking at a few minutes of footage and going “This looks NOTHING like Sonic!”  A design that has been tested in comics, cartoons, and video games.  IF they thought normal movie goers would prefer the first one they would not have changed it. But it just looked CREEPY so ... old school works better.  That’s why it was changed.