The Sonic the Hedgehog Movie is Getting Pushed Back Until 2020

When the first trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie was released, fans weren’t into his gloveless hands, weirdly toned legs, and, worst of all, human teeth. A redesign was announced shortly after the trailer dropped. And apparently it’s going to take a while, as the film’s director announced Friday that the movie’s release will be delayed by three months, pushing it back into 2020.

"Taking a little more time to make Sonic just right," director Jeff Fowler tweeted, alongside an image featuring the new February 14th, 2020 release date.

It’s not the first time in recent years that visual effects artists have had to make last-minute changes to a film after its trailer drew criticism. Disney tweaked the design of Winnie the Pooh for 2018’s Christopher Robin, after viewers complained that the bear looked a bit sad and dingy in the film’s first trailer.

io9 talked to VFX editors about the work that it will take to transform Sonic into something other than a creepily proportionate humanoid. Luckily, it’s unlikely that a full film’s worth of animation will have to be scrapped, because "when trailers involving digital characters are released, what you see is typically all that’s been finished by that point," according to i09. "That means, by the time the world was fully introduced to Sonic the Beefy-Legged Hedgehog, 'maybe five percent' of the movie had been fully animated with him in it." Still, Sonic’s VFX designers are almost certainly feeling the time crunch, as just redesigning a character can take months.

This story originally appeared on Esquire.com.

* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.