It should be emphasized that Marvel is far from the only company to do this shit. This is an industry-wide issue.
This documentary Life After Pi (go ahead and watch, it’s a half hour long) exposes how this was a rampant problem ten years ago as well. The movie follows Rhythm & Hues Studios, a successful VFX house that nonetheless went out of business due to the awful way Hollywood shortchanges VFX work. They were working on successful films with quality work and couldn’t stay in business. This studio collected an Oscar for their work on Life of Pi two weeks after declaring bankruptcy and when they tried to speak to the problem onstage their mic was cut. Nobody wanted to hear it. The movie cites 20 other VFX houses that went under the same way.
This article from 2022 explains how the VFX industry is fundamentally broken.
1993’s Jurassic Park had 63 VFX shots. In 1997, Starship Troopers made headlines for having almost 500. Today’s blockbusters routinely have over 2,000 VFX shots — and far less time to complete them.
“Jurassic Park was in postproduction for three years, with seven months for principal photography,” Perry says. “Now we have shows with thousands of VFX shots and they need to be done in six months.“
… Even though ideas change throughout production, the deadline rarely does. This leads to a major issue in the VFX industry known as scope creep.
“It’s not uncommon for vendors to work on shots for weeks or months, only to have those thrown out when a production changes their mind,” Rhythm & Hues founder Keith Goldfarb says. “When that happens, the production rarely accounts for money or time, they just expect the changes in half the time.”
They don’t get paid by the studio for the extra work or for the work that gets thrown out, but the VFX house has to pay their employees for the time. That leads to more money going out than there is coming in, and people working a lot of unpaid overtime to hit the deadlines. VFX artists burn out, companies go bankrupt, the studios make tons of money off these films that don’t get shared with the effects houses that made them or with the artists who put in the work.
When Ang Lee was asked about this, after Rhythm & Hues went under while making his movie, he complained that he wished digital effects were cheaper. That’s the general attitude of Hollywood in a nutshell.
Marvel is by far the worst offender, don’t get me wrong. They are absolutely awful about to their effects houses. But all the studios are doing this shit and have been for as long as digital effects have been in use. It’s across the board and has to be addressed that way.
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