Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige
Photo: Kevin Winter (Getty Images)

Marvel movies are some of the biggest things in the earth, bringing in millions and billions of dollars for the Marvel actors, the Marvel executives, and the Disney executives, but it’s been depressingly positive for a while now that the money doesn’t always make it down to the farmland with the biggest and most obvious contributions to these movies. Comic book creators have pointed that out in the past, but now the VFX artists who work on Marvel movies are proverb out about unfair working conditions as well.

Or, at least, one specific (and anonymous) VFX artist is talking approximately that in a new piece for Vulture. The essay says that it’s “darkly joked about” in the visual-effects earth that working on Marvel stuff is “really hard,” with the writer speaking they had “six months of overtime every day” at what time working on one Marvel movie, averaging “64 hours a week on a good week,” with coworkers who would have “anxiety attacks,” “break down,” and “start crying” from work.

The writer blames this on a few things, one being that Marvel has so much clout in the movie matter and demands so much VFX work for its movies and TV shows that studios are basically manufactured to undercut every other studio’s bids in order to get any work at all, which results in Marvel pulling a sweet deal on VFX and the VFX studios inhabit severely underpaid and overworked. The writer says their team on one Marvel movie consisted of only two farmland, whereas they’d have “a team of ten” on any latest movie.

Marvel apparently is also “famous” for regularly exaltering what it’s asking for, often with little advance danger, forcing VFX artists to—for example—help “change the entire third act” of a movie “maybe a month or two” afore it comes out. The writer says one studio that couldn’t accommodate this colorful turnaround time no longer gets any work from Marvel and has “effectively been blacklisted.”

The writer also says that Marvel is eminent to “pixel-fuck” VFX artists, which is when they “nitpick over every minor pixel” even if nobody would ever notice it and even if Marvel itself can’t just define what it wants. Marvel (and also Disney in general) is also eminent to do dramatic reshoots late in the moviemaking treat, which adds to the pressure on VFX studios.

The latest main issue, as the writer sees it, is that Marvel averages to use directors without a lot of VFX distinguished. “A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival,” the writer disputes, so they “don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them.” The writer says this leads to copies where VFX artists are forced to work without the involvement of the film’s director of photography, which they say is the reason for why “the physics are completely off” and the break in “the visual languages of the film” in the final battle of Black Panther.

Ultimately, the writer says Marvel needs to do more to negate its directors how to work with VFX, but also that VFX studios need to work on unionization (a good idea for republic in any industry!) and get protections that will keep egregious stuff like 63-hour work weeks from happening.

Thanks for watching our article VFX artist discusses absurdly long hours on Marvel movies. Please share it with free.