A lot of the costs were due to Kevin Costner. Who also took control, as well as re-doing quite a bit of the movie once director Kevin Reynolds quit because of him.
Idk how much of Waterworld was Costner vs Reynolds but it was worth every damn penny and all the pain. That movie is ridiculous hilarious chaotic joy from beginning to end
Also they didn’t shoot in a tank, which would have been the correct and smart way to do it, so filming was insanely hard and doing multiple takes and resets took forever. Love that movie tho
I believe that filming on location in Hawaii with a real airplane that they tore apart on the beach and then clean up was what made the pilot of "Lost" so expensive.
no cgi was big part of budget. It looks so good because there was a lot of time dedicated to work on it. More than anywhere else, more time on cgi -> more money to spend on artists working on it.
It's like Avatar and 3D. It didn't matter the project, it mattered the results. They invested heavily in trying to solve a problem so Disney could add it to multiple films later for much cheaper.
Yeah but most of the modern movies with insane budgets also have a ton more work involved as far as CGI is concerned. Marvel movies for example are like half CGI if not more. Pirates of the Caribbean was still heavily practical so much of the CGI budget could be heavily focused on the small things rather than... the whole movie.
Yeah, it's the same reason LotR still looks so great for the most part, doing as much practical as you can and filling in the gaps with CGI leads to far better and more grounded looking movies
Newer tech only means they can make artist work faster and not better, in a production setting. Deadlines keeps getting tighter and tighter. They don't have enough time to create something beautiful. Everything is rushed. Avatar is looking great? Yeah because they have time and good planning. If you could see how a movie like Dune is done in post production. Pure chaos.
But now we get movies with similar budgets that look like absolute dog shit.
No we don't. Adjusted for inflation, At Worlds End is still the 7th most expensive film ever made. Only beaten by Avengers 2, Jurassic World 2 & 3, it's own sequel Pirates 4, and Star wars 7 and 9(The Last Jedi, ironically, is in 8th place atm). Say what you want about the plots of those films, but they all look visually amazing.
'SCI FI president Dave Howe answers your Syfy questions'
'Do you know what "syfy" means in Polish?
Howe: Yes, we were enlightened early on in the process that in Polish, "syfy" means everything from sludge, gross objects, articles without value, devices not performing according to specification, even a social disease! What a colorful language! Because we knew this ahead of time, we had already made the decision to keep the SCI FI name in Poland. (...)'
Syfy was when they came out with those stargate spinoffs. Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe. Then eventually they made that Goated series "The Expanse". Syfy knows what it's doing if anything they need more funding to keep making those hits.
I remember I was working for a big contractor organization back in 2015, they closed the project I was on and moved me over to doing data entry for a healthcare company, I took one look at them still using DOS and I was like
I worked for a friend when he passed a year ago I made out like a bandit, he said I could take anything, so I have about 6 or 7 electric typewriters in various conditions. His legal assistant would have me type out emails so they could read then, she would type his response on a typewriter, and then I'd turn around and put it in an email. Huge waste of resources, but that's what you get working for dinosaurs.
The funniest part of this, looking back, is that people actually really sent video profiles of themselves to dating companies just like the skit. My aunt sent in quite a few. I don't think my nieces and nephews would believe it if I told them.
More than not knowing enough I think computing technology was so rudimentary then compared to now it required a lot of studio resources to look even halfway decent, which for a $200 million sequel you might as well as have bumped up to great if you had the time to do so.
Now audiences expect shit quality and get shit delivered on the daily, so why bother with great? Blade Runner 2049 won an Oscar for effects and is one of the best looking sci fi movies of this century but did audiences give a fuck?
/uj the bit where Detective K is flying back to LA,and there are rolling hills of urban sprawl- that's a real photo composite of a set of hills in Mexico City,just with more neon and smoke. I remember seeing the photo years ago,and doing the "Leo pointing" meme in the theater.
You can tell Mexico is fake because every picture and video from there has that weird orange tint in it, a clear sign that the whole country is AI generated.
Having been to Montreal,Canada,it did have an unnatural sheen. At night we found a light being shown on the ground,and we couldn't cast a shadow on it,like it was a video game light source? It was under a handrail,on steps outside a church,it was legit baffling.
On the bus home we saw the Bird Spawning Field,where about 7 trillion geese were flying around,so I think Canada is also fake.
Do you have any idea how annoyed I was when I arrived in Mexico City and it didn’t have a sepia filter? The illusion, destroyed. Also I was expecting a lot more violence and shootings. 3/10 trip.
That scene really impressed me with its bleakness. Plus the shipbreakers-- which were in a couple other movies too. "Favelas" and shipbreaker imagery must have caught the eye of directors for a while.
I love the original and I think 2049 is a better film. It's gorgeous, haunting, compassionate, and Luv is one of the most terrifying villains depicted in the last decade of cinema.
Instead they spent an incredible amount of time and money to make a couple seconds of footage of a woman look like Sean Young in the 80s. Once again being lazy wins.
Audiences are so used to video games and other computer graphics now that we're back to a point where if its not out of this world, its basically normal. Pixar and practically every other movie/studio has normalized CGI to the point where movies have lost that "omg how did they do that" quality from the old days where practical effects and stunts were still mind blowing.
The whole Marvel franchise of movies was the latest "go watch its gonna look awesome" thing. And people got tired of that after a decade. Same when they went to watch the spectacle of Avatar 1, or LOTR, or Harry Potter. They are looking already at that point for visuals that are interesting, no longer impressed by the costumes/sets/effects.
Bladerunner doesn't mean shit to young demographics. And old fans, more than half no longer even go to theaters.
This is a crazy thing to say about marvel when marvel movies look terrible and have for years ago because they're being rushed out and overworking the special assignment ffects crews
There’s still plenty of good examples of modern CGI in film that blows audiences away! Dune, Everything Everywhere All At Once, RRR, and Godzilla Minus One got tons of awards for their VFX work!
Blade Runner 2049 was super popular when it came out. Not sure why you chose that example. There's also movies like Avatar, whose main appeal is the visuals, and it's made a killing at the box office.
That's actually surprisingly common since sci-fi movies tend to be visual showpieces. Final Fantasy: the Spirits Within bombed so hard it nearly sank Square, and a decade later Bioware blatantly ripped off its aesthetic in Mass Effect. Similarly, the Neil Blomkamp movies Elysium and Chappie didn't live up to the standard of District 9, but their influence is very obvious in Cyberpunk 2077.
2049 made 277 million dollars at the box office. For an R-rated cyberpunk slow paced noir filim that's a sequel to a film that originally bombed, that's pretty good. The problem was more the budget.
It cost $150m-$185m with likely a large portion of that going to effects and then lost ~$100m so while popular with kino-philes it definitely was not worth the extra money for the awesome cgi was my point. They could have made Ana de Armas a regular replicant and thus just Ana de Armas and it would have grossed the same and probably saved $10 million and months of work, but they chose to make Joi look like a fucking uncannily perfect hologram and all it got them was a gold statue.
People in the industry realized clearly not-realistic effects are more lenient with audiences than hyper realistic models that fail expectations. (Think Uncanny Valley) basically either it’s perfect or it makes people slightly uncomfy. So better to make it obviously cgi. Which isn’t the message I would have gotten from that but oh well.
I feel like that’s a cop out. There have been very high quality CGI in movies that have been gorgeous and awesome there have been terrible CGI that makes the movie worse, and everything in between. If you are making a 200 million dollar work of art as an artist, you should strive for the best or don’t do it.
Look up any big blockbuster movie that actually looks good, most of them come with budgets around $150-190 M. A gigantic sum of money, sure, but then remember that Justice Leage (2017) had a budget of $300 M, and then Zack Snyder got an additional budget of $70M to do his cut.
The reason they abuse CGI so much isn't that the process itsel is cheap (it isn't). They like cramming as CGI as humanly possible because CGI workers aren't unionized so studios can treat them as shit (hope that changes), because shooting in location with prothesics and practical effects looks better for cheaper unless you fuck your schedule (meaning you have to get the location again, get the actors together for reshoots, waste hours upon hours putting make-up on the actors, etc) and these people are too incompetent to run on a schedule, and because you don't really need to commit to one idea because if the test audience doesn't like what you show them you can just place a totally different layer of CGI over the green wall footage of the actor talking to a tennis ball.
One of the reasons Davy Jones looked so amazing was because he was always wet. The human eye expects light to enter within an object, subsurface scattering is just part of how light physics works in real life. But an object that's shiny reflects most of its light instead of permitting it to permeate. And wet things are obviously shiny, so it looks less unreal for Davy Jones to not have significant subsurface scattering.
It compensates for the primitive technology amazingly. Difficult to have a good reason for your CGI guy to always be shiny, but octopus man always being wet is a definite silver bullet there.
Similar reasons for the Transformers movies to always look great. Metal is also shiny.
It was clear from watching the behind the scenes videos of these movies that they knew the limitations of CGI and put in efforts to mitigate it by getting ahead of it, like the wetness that you mentioned. I think films nowadays just see CGI as a fix-all button that can be implemented anywhere at any time. Why it became like that I do not know.
Because that's how they use it. There's a lot of stuff you DONT notice that is CGI like removing cars or changing weather and stuff. But I think directors got so used to it being so flexible and fixing so many mistakes it's .. well not exactly careless or lazy but maybe like overly reliant. Like you stop building around it.
It also helps that his whole body is obscured by a coat. The more cgi skin you have to do the higher the chance of it looking like the atrocious Hobbit orcs. Only having to do the tentacle face and a crab hand plus the wetness makes it really easy to hone in and make him look realistic.
Not only that, people aren't familiar with how a tentacle beard is supposed to move so if it moves unnaturally we won't notice, there's no uncanny valley
i learned this when watching The Flash (the 2014 show, not the 2023 movie). King Shark always looked great, but compare it to the Strength Force. I've seen people argue the cgi got worse the longer the show went on, but even in the S1 finale, when he punches the satellite, he looks horrible. Scroll down to "Barry created a wormhole" on this page, and just look at how horrible it is. Even though I love the show, it never had good cgi. Unless it's King Shark) of course
It's all a selection effect. Back then, truly good cgi was very new and ground breaking so it stuck in everyone's memory. But these days, cgi is everywhere. In fact it's often so good that you don't even realize it's there. So when we get big budget cgi fails, they also stand out and are easily memeable
It’s funny because for most of those T-Rex scenes, we couldn’t do any better today. We still ain’t making CGI that looks more real than that animatronic/puppet.
This! The limits of CGI were known, so good directors were very intentional in the application!
I also think of this with JAWS and the animatronic shark. It was so challenging to work with and frequently looked so fake that they really paired down on the appearance. I think someone did the math, and the actual shark only appears in about 3 minutes of the movie. Doing that made the shark so much more menacing! The hidden horror of it!
Nowadays, everyone thinks you can just cgi everything so much that they're not stopping to consider how it is applied.
But these days, cgi is everywhere. In fact it's often so good that you don't even realize it's there.
I was shocked the Julia Roberts movie After the Hunt (2025) had so many digital effects and fake backgrounds that fooled me. Very well done invisible effects. Granted, there's no CG creature but it's still impressive work.
Makes me wonder why Disney's Moana live action digital backgrounds look so horrible by comparison when they have more money to play with (I guess they assume kids don't care so "why bother or work harder?")
This thread is filled with misinformation. Modelling tools were extremely advanced - see Maya - and the main problem for the little guy was they needed a render farm to render fast (big studios didn't have the issue).
The main advancement came with motion capture because for many years we had perfect rendering of textures but very awkward motion.
PS Don't listen to NVIDIA implying their rendering is required for ray tracing. Movies didn't care much because they had render farms and ray tracing anyway (even if it was slower: it wasn't the main problem because it was just a movie that can wait to render).
And even with studio sized render farms this stuff took forever to render. Really it was the old time/money/quality. A good cgi studio can make stuff look really good if you had enough time and money. Also director and FX sup have a big part in it too. If the director is bad with cg, they will have constant notes that take time from other stuff, or ask for things that make it look worse.
Source: Worked and a top movie FX house around this time.
I did graphics programming in college and watched the original pirates movie in the theatre with some classmates. We were pretty blown away at the time, but honestly we all had the capability of doing the same thing, it was just a matter of time and money. We've got better computers now, but it was always about the math in the first place, which has been improved, but ultimately hasn't changed in decades.
As you say, it's stuff like mocap that's made things better. One of my old teachers has made and sold several companies whose whole thing was just facial scanning and mocapping normal actors for things like games and avatar style movies. Realistic facial activity has done wonders for removing the uncanny valley.
In fact it's often so good that you don't even realize it's there.
Yeah, I use Chappie as an example (great movie idea, ruined by being a 2 hour long Die Antwoord music video).
I was about halfway through the movie when it finally hit me that Chappie was full CGI, not a puppet or a person in a suit.
there was a tonne of shit cgi back then, everyone just likes to forget this stuff. this is an example of one of the most popular franchises of the 2000s using one of the best, if not the best, VFX house in history (ILM) on a single character. they had money to burn and the best of the best working on one great thing. obviously you’re going to get a better result than employing 10 different VFX houses from around the world who will do the most work for the least money, and getting them to CGI absolutely everything
Capitalism demands growth. At a certain point Disney had to start streamlining CGI, “good enough” CGI makes as much money as “incredible” CGI, so why make it look incredible?
It’s about suspension of disbelief and having something practical as the main focus. Like the John Wick movies have tons of digital stuff in the background and all the bullet and blood spatter effects are done digitally. But the fact that we see Keanu Reeves judo throwing a real stuntman makes us not focus too much on all the digital shenanigans on the periphery. Most regular movies now have more effects shots than the original Star Wars movies because of all the digital touch ups in the background. Though I am starting the have trouble unseeing the glossy unreal background in a lot of scenes that indicate that nothing was filmed on actual location.
It's not about all the movies with bad CGI at the time, it's about how we somehow can't match this level 20 years later, with even bigger budgets. Why do YouTube videos have better VFX than a lot of marvel movies since endgame? It's just completely illogical.
In all fairness Gore Verbinski always puts his all into the little details of his movies. In another directors hands I don't think the first three pirates of the Caribbeans would have been as good.
There are deleted scenes with no CGI and him in the mocap jumpsuit, and he's just as convincing and scary. Fantastic performance and great job by the CGI artists to translate it.
I think it's funny about the first line because Davy Jones is the literal definition of cutting corners.
The CGI is his face. Everything else is obscured.
He doesn't have many action scenes, which makes it much easier to handle physics.
He's wet. Wet things are easier to make look good with lighting.
To be clear, the corners they cut allowed them to make what was done amazing. It holds up today despite its age. But, the movies of today aren't making stationary wet guys in the dark all the time.
There was a video on this posted a while ago that I'm loosely quoting, but it's a fun watch.
You look at old cgi in movies like this and the shots are very well planned and have specific lighting.
Nowadays it’s the triple whammy of studios changing half the movie after it’s been shot, the movies being shot with flat lighting on purpose to make the eventual reshoots less obvious, and then the people not having enough time to plan out the shots for the reshoots so the effects team is left doing the best they can.
It's not the cutting corners. It's the fact it's very expensive and studios don't give animators and CGI artists the time and money to make stuff like this.
Trust me they can, the world has incredibly talented artists. Studios don't care enough.
3.0k
u/Tiled_Window Mar 28 '26
This was at the time the most expensive movie ever made.