Gaming Tech Ruining Hollywood Effects, Says Top Director
A legendary filmmaker reveals why modern movie magic looks increasingly fake, pointing to an unexpected culprit that's transforming cinema into something unrecognizable.
Hollywood's visual effects are getting worse, and Gore Verbinski thinks he knows exactly why. The director behind the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies blames gaming technology for making films look increasingly artificial.
"I think the simplest answer is you've seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape," Verbinski explained in a recent interview. "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... I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards."
When Movie Magic Meets Gaming Reality
Epic Games created Unreal Engine as a powerful 3D tool for video game development. Major titles like Fortnite, Gears of War, and Hogwarts Legacy all run on this technology. But the software has crossed over into film and television production.
The Mandalorian and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania both used Unreal Engine for their visual effects. The results? Movies that feel more like role-playing games than traditional cinema.
The Light Problem
Verbinski sees a fundamental issue with how gaming engines handle visual elements. "It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you're in a heightened, unrealistic reality," he said. "I just don't think it takes light the same way... 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."
The director witnessed this decline firsthand. His Pirates trilogy featured groundbreaking CGI, especially the character Davy Jones. But Dead Men Tell No Tales, released 14 years after the original, showed noticeably inferior effects quality.
Speed has become the enemy of quality. Studios rush through animation processes that once required meticulous hand-crafted work. The result? Characters and environments that feel disconnected from reality, even when they're supposed to exist in our world.