Many moviegoers have been complaining for at least a decade now about the quality of computer graphics in movies. No one has been able to fully explain why films from decades ago often had more convincing CGI than today’s blockbuster releases that have much bigger budgets.
But the man behind major Hollywood films like The Ring, Rango, and what many consider a high point of CGI, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, may finally have a satisfying answer.
In an interview with the pop-culture site But Why Tho?, film director Gore Verbinski named the Unreal Engine as a surprising culprit behind the worsening state of movie CGI.
Every time a new action, sci-fi, or superhero movie comes out, fans rush online to complain about its visual effects, wondering why they look so lackluster compared to the late-1990s and early-2000s films they grew up with, like Jurassic Park, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or early Marvel movies.
It’s easy to chalk those complaints up to nostalgia, but others have suggested there’s more going on. One popular theory is that the industry’s growing reliance on CGI for everything from backgrounds and costumes to props has stretched visual-effects teams too thin. James Gunn, the director of Guardians of the Galaxy and the latest Superman film, has backed that idea.
“If you do some research, you’ll see my films have always taken a different approach, and I’ve always given my VFX artist-collaborators time to do their jobs properly, and the respect they deserve. And the quality of the VFX in those films is uniformly great because of it (and because my friends at Weta and Framestore and ILM and more are amazingly talented),” Gunn wrote in a post on Threads in 2024.
Others have blamed a broader drop in overall film quality for the growing backlash against CGI.
But Verbinski has a more specific ax to grind.
“I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape,” Verbinski told But Why Tho?. “So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema.”
Unreal started as a gaming engine in 1998, but newer versions of the software have made their way into Hollywood productions in recent years, including in The Mandalorian, Westworld, and Fallout.
Verbinski said he misses when Maya was the software of choice for visual effects. “I just don’t think [Unreal Engine] takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface scattering and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way,” he said. “So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand.”
Verbinski said that shift has helped push TV and Movie CGI into an uncanny, video-game-like territory.
“And then just what’s become acceptable from an executive standpoint, where they think no one will care that the ships in the ocean look like they’re not on the water,” said Verbinski, acknowledging that the time and tools to do the job are downstream of the decision-makers who hold the purse strings.
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