It goes without saying that VFX artists are amongst the most overworked and underpaid creatives in Hollywood, which is even more unfair when their work comes under such intense scrutiny and ends up being blasted if it isn’t up to scratch, but Marvel Studios could be in for a rude awakening.
It was recently revealed that the company’s put-upon effects wizards are planning to unionize in order to secure themselves better working conditions, and in a scathing interview with IGN, several of them have come forward and outlined exactly why the all-conquering comic book outfit needs to do better.
“For us, I was on WandaVision and they told us, ‘Well, you’re not going to have any more days off in the next three months until we deliver episode 10.’ We were already working 18-hour days. I was like, ‘How is this supposed to be sustainable?’ It’s like, well, ‘who do you want to do this work?’ Because the folks who are making this happen for you right now are getting drowned.”
The simple answer is that it isn’t, with another Marvel alum weighing in on a situation that’s been going on behind the scenes for far too long without anything being done about it.
“Things do take a dive. You can kind of hear it in the press these days. You hear some detraction from people saying that, like, ‘Oh, these Marvel films feel too CGI,’ or something to that effect. Some of that really does come from the amount of corner-cutting that gets done in order to try and get these things out by X deadlines so that the studio ultimately can make all of its numbers that it needs to make so that it can make the maximum amount of profit.”
There’s a simple fix , but it remains up to Marvel if it wants to offer the obvious resolution to the issue, which is quite simply paying these people more.