She-Hulk's Shaky VFX Are Only Part Of The Story Behind A Chaotic Production
Marvel Studios is in trouble. The once-mightiest franchise in Hollywood has recently seen a string of box office disappointments, TV shows with poor viewership, and poorer critical receptions. One of the lowest points was "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law." The show was a mess, from its story to its humor, and most of all its VFX. Its meta-humor may have allowed it to poke fun at the problems plaguing Marvel Studios at large with a fourth wall break, but it did nothing to actually fix those problems.
In a new report by Variety about the many issues Marvel is facing, the recent firing of top exec Victoria Alonso is brought up. According to the report, Alonso was a scapegoat for a lack of oversight on script development for Marvel projects. We've known about the VFX crunch plaguing Marvel and how many of its movies are still being written during post-production for a while, but the report by Variety points to a larger issue.
Take the first episode of "She-Hulk," in which we learn of Jennifer's powers and training through a series of flashbacks. We've known for a while that the episode was heavily restructured and the flashbacks were meant to take place in the show's penultimate episode. Turns out, it was worse.
Head writer Jessica Gao told Collider that the writers' room actually wrote those scenes for the fourth episode, and then it was moved during production. "Months into post-production, Kevin [Feige] and everybody at Kevin's level, wanted to move it to the first episode, and I fought them tooth and nail," she explained.
A fundamental problem with Marvel
According to the Variety report, Marvel executives watched the "She-Hulk" footage and "realized the scene needed to happen in the pilot episode so that audiences could see more of the character's backstory early." This left it to the show's VFX team to fix the mess.
"The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts," a source involved with "She-Hulk" told Variety. "That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material."
Of course, those changes aren't cheap. Having major script changes and restructuring happen last minute means overworked VFX artists (which has led to them moving to unionizing). It's why we've seen Marvel projects of late premiere with unfinished VFX, like "Thor: Love and Thunder" and "She-Hulk" itself. According to Variety, a single episode of the show cost about $25 million, much more than the budget of an episode of the final season of "Game of Thrones." Granted, you could actually see what was happening on "She-Hulk," but that didn't mean it looked good.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is now a franchise that cannot sustain itself. These kinds of major rewrites happen at the last minute, with top brass unaware of the story or indecisive about their projects are too costly to justify. We've seen how this affects the quality of Marvel shows and movies, and it cannot last forever.