Unreal Engine is to blame for bad movie CGI says top Hollywood director

Although the video game world holds up Unreal Engine as the pinnacle of current technology, that’s not how it’s viewed by at least one

For years it’s seemed like the quality of computer-generated imagery in movies has been going backwards, with decades old films like Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest still having better visual effects than many movies made today.

The Avatar films are an obvious exception but far too many movies look like a hazy mess of brown sludge, with highly unconvincing physics. That’s normally put down to film effects companies (which are treated abominably by Hollywood) being overworked and underfunded, but director Gore Verbinski has offered up a different culprit: Unreal Engine.

Although originally created purely as a video game graphics engine, the modern versions are increasingly used in TV and film, and according to Verbinski it’s responsible for the ‘greatest slip backwards’ in movie quality CGI.

Unreal Engine emerged in the late 1990s and with Unreal Engine 3 in 2006 became increasingly popular amongst a wide variety of games companies, who previously relied on either their own bespoke game engines or other lesser tools.

With Unreal Engine 4 and 5 the technology became almost ubiquitous and at the same time the software began to be used for previz (previsualisation, i.e. planning out shots) in movies, before eventually being used for final effects shots as well.

It became especially popular after its use in the Volume technology, pioneered by The Mandalorian Disney+ series, but can be seen elsewhere in movies ranging from The Matrix Resurrections to Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (possibly one of the ugliest movies ever made, in terms of its use of CGI).

It’s not as widely used in film as it is in games but in a recent But Why Tho? podcast, Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films and the animated movie Rango, suggested that its use has been a major backwards step for the industry.

‘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,’ said Verbinski.

‘I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards,’ he said, in reference to what was traditionally the most popular software for movie quality CGI.

‘I just don’t think it takes light the same way,’ he said of Unreal Engine. ‘I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in 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 irony of movie effects becoming a blur of ugly browns and greys will not be lost on anyone who lived through the Xbox 360 era, when Unreal Engine was beginning to solidify its dominance, but there seems little question that the average quality of movie effects has decreased in the last 10 years, instead of getting better.

Verbinski, who hasn’t released a new film in almost 10 years, was promoting his new sci-fi movie Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Unreal Engine 6 is expected to be released before the end of the decade.

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