Why Special Effects Aren't Special Anymore (And How CBMs Contributed to the Problem)

The year is 2023 and this summer saw the release of many massive tent poles with insanely high budgets and an army of visual effects artists working on countless shots. So why do almost all of them look terrible? We have been seeing over the past decade or so a downgrade in quality of content. That is not to say there has not been movies with good effects. There have been. But the quality across the board seems to have taken a dive.

There are a lot of different factors contributing to the decline in the art. In this episode of Journey Through Cinema, I will be taking a look at the various issues in our modern landscape and how we potentially got here. From us just getting numb to CGI or overworked CGI artists or just plain laziness. There are a lot of contributing factors. Just recently the Marvel visual effects teams made the decision to uninionize due to bad working conditions and it affecting their work.

Though it is easy to blame the overworked CGI artists, and it has become popular to do so, I think that this may be a cop out to keep from blaming the real culprit. The artists are doing the best they can on a short schedule and still are able to release technological marvels. No one can blame these artists who have a real passion for the craft and put their heart and soul into their work. Instead there is I think a more obvious person to blame and who has done more than anyone to negatively impact the industry.

The easiest way to see where it all went wrong is to rewind the clock.

Through the 2000’s we saw CGI make massive improvements, but the arms race to make effects look real has seemingly hit a wall and companies no longer have a vested interest in making things look real and have settled on “real enough”. How did this happen and what role did CBMs play in this new status quo? This will be explored in this newest video.

Check out the video to find out!

So what are your thoughts? Leave a comment down below on what you think is the major contributing factor to the decline in visual effects. There are a lot of factors that can be pointed to, but what do you think is the biggest and most important.