There's a dirty secret in Hollywood that everyone in the industry knows but nobody says out loud: CGI is where bad scripts go to hide.
When a studio reads a script and realizes the story is thin, the characters are flat, and the dialogue doesn't work, they don't fix the script. They throw $100M at visual effects and hope the audience is too dazzled to notice that nobody on screen has a reason to exist.
It used to work. It doesn't anymore. We've all seen too many CGI spectacles with nothing behind the curtain. The magic is gone. And the people paying the highest price aren't the audiences — it's the VFX artists.
The VFX Arms Race
In 2000, the average blockbuster had maybe 200-500 VFX shots. By 2023, that number is routinely 2,000-3,000+. Some Marvel movies have VFX in literally every frame. Not because the story demands it — because the production demands it. Scenes are shot on green screens with the plan to "figure it out in post."
"Fix it in post" has become the most expensive sentence in Hollywood. It means the script wasn't done, the vision wasn't clear, and now thousands of VFX artists have to build an entire world from scratch while the director changes their mind every week.
The Human Toll
VFX artists are among the most overworked and underpaid people in Hollywood. They work 60-80 hour weeks for months. Deadlines are insane because post-production timelines keep shrinking as studios lock in release dates before the movie is even filmed.
Multiple VFX studios have gone bankrupt in recent years despite working on the biggest movies in the world. Rhythm & Hues won the Oscar for Life of Pi and went bankrupt the same week. The company that made your favorite movie's VFX might not exist anymore.
And what are these artists working on? In many cases, they're building CGI environments for scenes that don't matter in stories that don't work. They're rendering photo-realistic hair on a character who has nothing interesting to say. They're animating a $50M battle sequence that exists because the script couldn't fill the runtime with actual drama.
CGI vs. Story: The Budget Split
Here's a rough budget breakdown for a typical $200M blockbuster:
- VFX: 40-50% ($80-100M)
- Cast: 15-25% ($30-50M)
- Production/crew: 15-20% ($30-40M)
- Script development: 1-2% ($2-4M)
Read that last line again. The script — the foundation that everything else is built on — gets 1-2% of the budget. The visual effects that are supposed to serve the story get 40-50%.
That ratio is insane. You're spending 50x more on how the movie looks than on what the movie says. That's like spending $500,000 on a restaurant's interior design and $10,000 on the chef. The place might look great, but the food is going to be terrible.
When CGI Works
CGI isn't the problem. Bad writing is the problem. CGI used well is incredible:
- The Lord of the Rings — VFX in service of a story that had been refined for decades
- Inception — Every VFX shot exists because the story demands it, not because the script is empty
- The Matrix — Invented visual techniques specifically to tell THIS story in THIS way
In every case, the script came first. The VFX served the story. Not the other way around.
The Solution Nobody Wants to Hear
Spend more on scripts. Spend less on VFX. Give writers more time and more money. Don't start production until the script is done — actually done, not "we'll figure it out on set."
A great script with okay VFX will always be better than a bad script with amazing VFX. Always. The Godfather has no VFX. Whiplash has no VFX. Pulp Fiction has no VFX. They're all better than every CGI spectacle made this year.
The VFX artists deserve better too. They deserve to work on movies that are worth the crunch. Not another green screen void for a franchise that's running on fumes.