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0 pointsilliarian3y ago0 comments

> When I was but a little boy, Terminator 2 had CGI and cost brazillians.

And it has very few CGI shots compared to modern movies. It only had about 50 CGI shots in total.

In comparison, Everything Everywhere All at Once which had tons of practical effects and budget constraints had 500. A modern blockbuster movie pushes the number of CGI shots beyond 2000.

> We have entire movies made with humans basically just standing in front of green screen. You cannot seriously claim it has gotten harder or more expensive.

Again. For some reason unbeknownst to me you keep assuming that CGI is cheap and easy. Especially given the amount of CGI, resoultions and the details that have to be there.

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A4ET8a8uTh03y ago

Hmm. Allow me to rephrase. Clearly, we are assuming two different current states. I indicated that T2 was made almost 30 years ago with MASSIVE improvements across just about every facet of computer generated visuals. That movie cost 100 million to make ( about twice that in today's dollars adjusted for inflation ) and it had some stars in it ( Arnold reportedly being paid cool $15M ), which easily explains some of the cost.

I am not assuming its cheap and easy. I am assuming it is both cheaper and easier than it was and noticeably so.

All that said, I think we may be just approaching it differently. Let me share my thought process.

Cameron suggested the actual CGI scene count is 42[1] ( we can do 50 for easier math, but 42 will favor your position so lets assume 42 ). According to wiki[2] CGI budget was 15M-17M ( and lets assume 17M to account for the upper cost to accommodate your view of CGI cost ).

At $17M for 42 an instance of CGI comes to $404k a pop for T2. Unfortunately, this is misleading as it does not give us a good way to compare against Turning Red as its all CGI, so we need to compare in minutes ( tr is 1h40m or 100 minutes ). Without doing any real analysis, I have to rely on net again[1], where we learn that:

"all the work required to bring the T-1000 to life, costing $5.5 million, and taking eight months to produce, which ultimately amounted to 3.5 minutes of screen time. "

5.5M/3.5 = $1.571M per minute for Terminator 2 ( or about ~3M USD adjusted for inflation ).

In other words, adjusted for inflation re-running TR assuming the same cost as T2 results in 300M ( 100 minutes * 3M per minute ) projected CGI cost for TR ( almost double TR's budget, which we know was not all CGI ). In other words, CGI has gotten almost 100% more efficient, partially because I seriously doubt entire $175M TR budget went to CGI ).

I am not arguing its peanuts ( although I am sure argument could be made what with current AI tools ), but it is definitely more cheap.

To be fair, it might not be more easy ( that I have zero knowledge of ).

[1]https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdofree.com/terminato... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_effects_of_Terminator_...

illiarianOP3y ago

> To be fair, it might not be more easy ( that I have zero knowledge of ).

Oh, it's definitely more involved. Because we went from rather low expectations like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq5ydeWWr4A to 4k highly detailed fluid animations where even individual hairs are simulated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNMeTMBWipE&list=PLgHd8hNRbl... :)

Or scenes like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhc3CinJHYY where you have multiple CG characters fully immersed into a scene with multiple human actors.

So it's more of "while it's definitely easier and cheaper to produce, the amount of work and detail that is now expected has gone up exponentially". I'm always reminded of this when I see VFX breakdowns for TV series like tis one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxTNhNe6Fbc

And I totally agree with your breakdown of costs :)

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