I watched The Creator earlier this week and was in awe of howcasuallygood it looks. The sci-fi film, from Rogue One andGodzilladirector Gareth Edwards, has plenty of flaws, but I couldn’t focus on any of them in the face of how seamlessly it integrates location photography and CG visual effects. The last movie I saw do this specific thing this well wasDune, and that cost double The Creator’s $80 million price tag. By the standards of blockbusters, The Creator is extremely inexpensive.
All of this has me thinking about how there seems to be a law of diminishing returns with blockbuster budgets.John Wick: Chapter 4,Barbie, and Oppenheimer were all budgeted around $100 million. They all look terrific, while movies that cost twice or even three times as much, likeAnt-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania($200 million) andIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny($300 million) look significantly worse. It has me wondering if horseshoe theory — a dumb idea that means that the further two political extremes get from the center, the more they wrap back around to draw near to each other — might actually apply to movie budgets. A filmmaker working with a shoestring budget could be defeated attempting to make a big special effects movie with no money, but so too can directors who are given access to seemingly limitless supplies of cash.
So how else do you explain it? Why does John Wick: Chapter 4 look incredible — maybe, even, if I’m in a hyperbolic mood, as good as digital cinematography can look — while Thor: Love and Thunder, budgeted at $250 million, looks egregiously bad at times? Why does The Creator so believably render its combination of the real world with the fantastical, whileSpider-Man: No Way Home’s composite shots look so obviously fake?
Well, looking at budgets can only take us so far. TheAvatarmovies were both astronomically expensive and are renowned for their visual effects. Ditto James Cameron’s previous world-conquering blockbuster, Titanic. A gargantuan price tag can sometimes result in a great-looking movie, but it’s no guarantee.
The more important thing is vision, and the ability to execute that vision on a grand scale. James Cameron, worked his way up from the ultra-low budget Piranha 2: The Spawning to the wildly expensive Titanic, gradually increasing budgets as he went. That kind of timeline gives a director room to figure out how to best get their vision on the big screen, and how to make the best use of the resources at their disposal. In recent years, it’s become more common for an indie director to make a few critically and/or commercially successful movies at a low budget and then get catapulted into franchise fare. It happened to Colin Trevorrow, Taika Waititi, Chloé Zhao, Jon Watts, and Captain Marvel’s Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. The experience of making a modest comedy like Safety Not Guaranteed or Hunt for the Wilderpeople has little to teach about marshaling the might of a massive corporation for a huge blockbuster like Thor: Ragnarok orJurassic World. Unfortunately, that’s been the most common path for a director who wants to level up over the course of the past decade.
And, oddly enough, it was Gareth Edwards’ path, too. He made his debut, Monsters, for just $500,000 before taking on Godzilla, budgeted at $160 million. It’s a massive leap, and he managed to pull it off. But that was possible because he worked in visual effects and animation for years before making the leap to directing, learning the skills that serve him now as a visual stylist. If there’s a lesson from his career it’s the same one you can learn by studying John Wick’s director Chad Stahelski or Barbie’s Greta Gerwig, both of whom worked for years in the movie business before directing their first features, both of whom slowly leveled up their budgets, and both of whom co-directed their first movies. Talent and budget help, but taking the time to hone your skills helps a lot more.
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