Can We Fix It In Post?

The cinephile corners of the Internet have a weird understanding of how post-production works.

A couple of days ago, the teaser for Captain America: Brave New World was released online, prompting a wide array of reactions. One of them was the now customary posting of screengrabs from the video with the sole purpose of making fun of the aesthetic quality of the visual effects, even though those shots are still being worked on and the movie is not due to open in theaters for another seven months. Actual VFX workers pointed out the latter aspect, but that didn’t stop the anti-superhero brigade from pontificating about the state of contemporary big-budget filmmaking.

Now, in the case of Marvel, it’s been documented that they’ve pushed VFX studios to the limit, due to a cavalier disregard for conventional post-production timelines on specific projects: the most notable offender is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which had its schedule reduced by a few months because of shifting release dates and allegedly retooled its ending a mere month before the premiere (additionally, some of the post-production resources were reassigned to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). But the scenes that featured in the trailers and made it all the way to the finished film generally looked decent, because the effects team had had enough time to work on them.