What Marvel Movies Look Like Before Special Effects

Fans love the Marvel Cinematic Universe for many reasons, including the franchise's eclectic characters, its engagement with decades of comic book lore, and its willingness to flood the market with crossovers and surprise easter eggs. If Marvel films are nothing else, they are visual spectacles, a reason to go to the movie theater and see fantastical stories play out on the biggest screens possible. The franchise's visual effects are a big draw, allowing various Marvel filmmakers to create worlds and characters that wouldn't always be possible to shoot in the real world.

In fact, Marvel's intense process for developing visual effects has occasionally drawn criticism, both from VFX artists and the filmmakers at the helm of these movies. Director James Gunn, who made the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films, told Gizmodo that Marvel's VFX demands were occasionally difficult to work with, because not everything gets correctly worked out in pre-planning stages. Still, he acknowledged that Marvel gets results. "I've seen them turn bad movies into okay movies, okay movies into good movies, and good movies into great movies because they do not f***ing stop," he said. "They give it whatever it needs to make it as good as it can possibly be until the 11th hour."

Because there's so much chatter about Marvel's visual effects, the studio often releases featurettes that show fans what various shots, creatures, environments, and more look like at various stages of the VFX process, thereby letting us see what Marvel movies look like before special effects. Let's take a look!

The Guardians of the Galaxy function like a family, from the parental influences of Star Lord (Chris Pratt) and Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to the bumbling siblings of Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and Drax (Dave Bautista). That dynamic is especially evident in the case of Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), a tree-like creature cut down to sapling size; he became Baby Groot at the end of the first film, then steadily aged through teen years into adulthood again.

The "Guardians of the Galaxy" movies are a family affair behind-the-scenes, too, with director James Gunn inviting his brother Sean Gunn to set to do motion capture for Rocket Raccoon. For "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," it was an especially emotional moment for the two brothers to be together on set. "In the moment we were shooting the wide shot and dancing toward each other, it was surreal and beautiful and wonderful," the director told The New York Times of the scene, which was set to "Dog Days Are Over."

A VFX reel for the film by visual effects studio Framestore shows both Gunn brothers on set filming the sequence. At this point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, motion capture technology has evolved so much that the Gunns aren't even wearing suits while performing the scene. Instead, they went at it freestyle, and Framestore digitally painted over their bodies, tracking their shapes after the fact.

Sometimes, especially when scenes and shots are created entirely with visual effects, more work goes into the process than we ever actually see on screen. That was the case in "Ant-Man and The Wasp," as is evident in a behind-the-scenes featurette for Wired. After all, the movie is about a man who can instantly shift his size; in the film, he gets incredibly small and also becomes incredibly large. That shift in perspective required numerous shots that were created entirely digitally, and the filmmakers' dedication to realism meant they did a lot of layering that isn't always visible in the final shot.

For example, one sequence sees a giant Ant-Man sink into the waters off San Francisco. Danielle Costa, Vice President of Visual Effects at Marvel Studios, broke it down, noting that the Pacific Ocean near San Francisco is pretty tough to see through. "What I think is funny about that particular shot is how much detail that they built, how much of the Bay they built, how much of his suit and how much they rendered and all of that," she said. "And then in the end, they kind of did a wash, deleting all of that great detail, because you wanted to give it the, you know, realistic quality of feeling like the murky Pacific Ocean."

No Marvel Cinematic Universe character moves quite like Spider-Man does, swinging on webs through cityscapes. That character presents a unique set of challenges for the visual effects artists behind the "Spider-Man" films, including the 2021 installment "Spider-Man: No Way Home." A behind-the-scenes featurette shared to Spider-Man's official YouTube account showed Tom Holland in costume, performing a number of stunts on wires in front of blue screens. Those environments and wires then get digitally swapped out, giving us the impression that Spidey is slinging webs all around New York City.

Action choreographer George Cottle explained that the wires were particularly important in developing the movie's action sequences. "The hard thing for wires ... is, we had to put at some points six, seven, even eight characters on wires at the same time, and they all had to be very unique to their own character," he recalled. In other words, Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) had a different wire setup than The Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), whose wires moved differently than Spider-Man's, and so on. 

Zendaya, who plays M.J. in the films, noted that there were plenty of people looking out for them on set while they performed wire stunts. "We have an incredible team of people who make sure that we are safe," she said. "It's like, when ever in the world will I be able to experience this stuff?"

Like many other VFX-enhanced creations in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vision (Paul Bettany) is developed through an on-set application of makeup and prosthetics that is later enhanced by CGI overlays. A featurette for Disney+ show "WandaVision" developed by special effects house SSVFX shows the process, which begins with Bettany actually on set. He wears purple makeup and has his face covered in motion-tracking dots. Those are then painted over digitally, and various layers add futuristic detail to Vision's face, including the iconic yellow Mind Stone that sits in the center of his forehead.

A special effects studio called MARZ also worked on Vision's look for the show. VFX supervisor Ryan Freer told Gizmodo that when all was said and done, the effect should be seamless, making it almost impossible to tell that you're looking at a superhero made largely out of CGI. He recalled scrolling through Reddit after the show debuted, seeing people trying to guess how the show's special effects were pulled off. "I went all the way down through all the boards and nobody really nailed it," he said. "There was maybe one person [who] said 'I heard they overlay visual effects on top of Vision or something,' but...yeah. It's the art of making art that no one notices."

Plenty of Marvel movies have been shot largely in front of green screens, allowing visual effects artists to go back after filming and add just about anything in the background. "The Marvels," on the other hand, was shot on The Volume, an immersive production screen that allows filmmakers to shoot with the virtual effects already present on set. Iman Vellani, who plays Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel, said in a behind-the-scenes featurette from Marvel, "The Volume screens are just the greatest thing ever, and you can actually see what you're supposed to see and not just a green screen, so that's always very, very helpful."

Director of photography Sean Bobbitt explained that this technology was especially useful in filming the sequences that take place on the spaceship. "When you look out every window of the spacecraft as we're flying along, there is something happening," he said. Visual effects supervisor Tara DeMarco pointed out what that meant for the actors on set. "We actually get to drift past a nebula and jump through a wormhole in a way that I never thought we'd be able to do on a set," she said.

Thanks to the timeline-twisting shenanigans of "Avengers: Endgame," Captain America (Chris Evans) manages to brawl with none other than himself. On an episode of Marvel's "Earth's Mightiest Show," visual effects supervisor Dan DeLeeuw broke down how the iconic fight sequence came together. He explained that the fight was filmed with stunt doubles, and then Evans came in and acted out each side of his coverage.

However, when they began to screen the movie for test audiences, they realized that the fight was missing something. "Originally, we shot it without the cowl," he recalled, referring to Cap's headgear. "People were losing track of which Cap was which." To solve the problem, visual effects artists went back in and added a CGI helmet overtop of the older/future Captain America.

The fight's environment, too, was created entirely in post-production. The fisticuffs were filmed on a green screen, and then VFX artists created the virtual skyscraper surrounding the actors from scratch. They set-dressed the virtual offices, developed reflections in glass, lit the windows, and more, and then they realized it was just too much to look at. "We ended up having to go in and just adding a little more atmosphere, kind of cheating the depth of field a little bit, just to kind of pull some of the detail out that we had put into it," he said, "so there wasn't as much visual information going into your eyes."

One of the most memorable action sequences in the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe is the close-quarters elevator fight in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier." Cap (Chris Evans) finds himself in a small glass elevator surrounded by goons, and he manages to take them all down before the doors open back up. It's a marvel of fight choreography, no pun intended, but the sequence had another trick up its sleeve, too. The elevator itself was a visual effect, meaning they didn't have to fit the camera in that same small space where Cap was busy making swift work of some bad guys.

A behind-the-scenes featurette from Marvel shows that the skeleton of the elevator was constructed on a green screen soundstage, allowing walls and glass panes to be removed in order to get the camera close to the action. "We took seven days to shoot that one scene in the elevator," revealed actor Frank Grillo. It was the first scene shot for the film, and it required weeks of rehearsal to get the fight choreography down. They built a mock elevator and rehearsed in it while filming a "video viz," which was shot and edited just like the final product would be. That allowed them to perfect the camera movements and locations of various elements in the physical space, work which then transferred to filming on the green-screen stage. Ultimately, Evans concluded, "That scene couldn't have gone better."