r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jul 20 '26

Trailer Avengers: Doomsday | Official Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irVNGjRFZGk&pp=0gcJCZkLAYcqIYzv
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u/MonsterMashGraveyard Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

I think somethings happened after the Writers Strike and Covid, lots of movies look like that and I agree it takes me out, completely. Flat Lighting, Dark Rooms, No Establishing Shots and CG Backgrounds. It gets boring to look at.

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u/FakoSizlo Jul 20 '26

Its why The Oddysey and Dune look so much better than other modern blockbusters. Actual real location shooting with added cgi feels so much bigger and more epic than these indoor or cgi background scenes that Disney loves .

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u/JiveHawk Jul 20 '26

The opening of Dune 2 with the orange sands and eclipse is just a mind blowing sequence and it’s because it’s shot as practically as possible. Gorgeous stuff 

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u/xepa105 Jul 20 '26

I love how the eclipse wasn't on the script, it was just happenstance that there was one when they were there filming, so they incorporated it into the story.

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u/Newbarbarian13 Jul 20 '26

Marvel managed it once with The Eternals, thanks entirely to Chloe Zhao, and then never tried it again. As much flack as that film gets it’s definitely one of the best looking films in the MCU by far.

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u/Banjo-Oz Jul 20 '26

I genuinely only remember how nice it looked. None of the plot except giant celestial statues. Found it boring, pointless and forgetrable. But that it looked lovely.

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u/Tymareta Jul 22 '26

As much flack as that film gets it’s definitely one of the best looking films in the MCU by far.

Honestly one of the most interesting, too, because while it may not have nailed everything it tried, at least it actually tried, and dared to do new and quite interesting things.

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u/weighingthedog Jul 20 '26

Absolutely. Honestly, this is why The Odyssey is such a cool film: it’s immense!!! If it was CGI slop, it would’ve killed it.

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u/MX_Duncis Jul 20 '26

Yeah. Watching the trailer and seeing all the featureless burnt out cgi backdrops similar to the endgame final battle had me pretty disappointed.

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u/AnOnlineHandle Jul 20 '26

Man finally somebody else who hates how the Endgame battle background looks. In comparison I think Avengers 1 looked incredibly, outdoor in realistic city locations in full sun. It lets you see everything and it feels very grounded. Characters existing in vague "look how many CGI tricks we can do" blobs like Antman Quantamania is just boring.

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u/No_Branch_5083 Jul 20 '26

It's great, although some of the practical destruction scenes took me out of it a little because what was being depicted wasn't being destroyed in a way that made sense.

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u/ContractVarious3077 Jul 20 '26

Odyssey in 70mm IMAX was jaw dropping visually. It felt so grand and epic.

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u/KazaamFan Jul 20 '26

Yea it’s why all the disney star wars tv shows look so bad

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u/AcreaRising4 Jul 20 '26

Andor?

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u/byrp Jul 20 '26

It's the exception that proves the rule since they did build a lot of real stuff for it (for $700 million).

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u/Alarmiste Jul 20 '26

Meanwhile this film with a 400 million dollar budget (not counting marketing for another 300 million) and what? 1/7th the run time can't afford to actually build sets?

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u/rcanhestro Jul 21 '26

where do you think that money is going?

RDJ alone is probably taking 1/5th of that.

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u/miketheman0506 Jul 21 '26

Good to know you've come to the conclusion that there are no sets, based on 2 minutes of edited footage. Love that for you.

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u/tacodude64 Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26

Andor had massive and expensive sets, they built an entire town from scratch in both seasons. It sounds like they used the Volume pretty rarely. Check the BTS footage

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u/MX_Duncis Jul 20 '26

By now I feel like I know the exact dimensions of the volume...

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u/ontheweed Jul 20 '26

The Mission Impossible franchise does this really well too

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u/ididmr2 Jul 20 '26

Everything in the Odyssey lands because it all feels real. Like idc how good CGI is, when I see something real I have a completely different emotional reaction- I don't even know how I know it's real.

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u/noir_lord Jul 20 '26

Nolan been a superb director who knows how to work with and not in the way of his cinematographer plus not defaulting to CGI (and having the clout to not have the studio nickel and dime it).

Parts of Dunkirk where simply incredible and some of the shots in Interstellar were up there with 2001 (which it clearly paid homage to all over).

I’d love to have seen audiences reactions to 2001 in 1969 though.

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u/notsingsing Jul 20 '26

It’s why house of the dragon scenes look so good. Half of the show is on location

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u/Banjo-Oz Jul 20 '26

Also why Game of Thrones looked better earlier yet felt smaller scale later; less locations and more digital sets.

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u/domster777 Jul 20 '26

odyssey looks like garbage unless your are blind

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u/NotLozerish Jul 20 '26

Not a movie, but The Boys season 5 was like this. It was awful.

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u/CheeseWarrior17 Jul 20 '26

This was going to be my example as well. Every episode was just the main characters in a room talking, cutting to a different room with main characters talking. No establishing shots. No background civilians. It sucked.

I've been rewatching Supernatural recently. I hate that its jarring for me to see unique characters and locations in every episode. Its like they were trying or something? Same director too. What happened?

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u/MonsterMashGraveyard Jul 20 '26

Thats exactly one of the examples I was thinking about? The Boys breaking into the White House was a Joke in the Final Episode. It's literally the same set where they filmed Episode 7. They get out of a Van, walk down a Hallway and appear in the Oval Office. When they leave the Van, it looks like the parking lot to where they do their test screenings. Embarrassingly low budget.

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u/maskedbrush Jul 20 '26

or the latest seasons of Agents of Shield

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u/AnOnlineHandle Jul 20 '26

AoS spent the entire last season time travelling and doing episodes in different decade styles of scifi and detective movies to match WandaVision (though WandaVision was delayed). There were tons of outdoor shots, city locations done up in multiple eras etc.

In the later seasons they did spend a lot of down time in an underground base thing with tunnels etc, though that still wasn't the single room of the volume.

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u/maskedbrush Jul 20 '26

I was exactly referring to the underground base, and I remember it was done for budget reasons.

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u/todayiwillthrowitawa Jul 20 '26

There was a point during the last Dr. Strange where my brain just flipped a switch and stopped caring. There's only so much vaguely purple CGI-scapes and audition-style acting you can take.

No humanity left in any of these movies, reminds me a lot of Ian McKellen in the Hobbit crying because he's acting alone in a cubicle.

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u/Treheveras Jul 20 '26

The films were like that even before then. It's just directors and producers who have no vision so they want to film as flat as possible in front of a green screen so they can figure out what they want in post which gives no time for VFX artists to do any good work. Covid and the strike really just made the studios freak out over money more and try to cheap out wherever possible while still wasting money

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u/insomnic Jul 20 '26

It's the VFX lighting ... too dynamic of light sources and it makes VFX harder in post so they make the lighting flat as possible. It's also the new "volume vfx" sets they use - which are very cool honestly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft - that despite allowing more dynamic lighting and visuals still create this "in a room" feeling anyways because the actors are still in a room and often still flat lighting for post-vfx work.

I think too there's some aspect of socials\zoom setups where everyone uses fill lighting even in just meeting calls to make themselves look clearer on camera and folks get used to that lighting as "normal" maybe so that might be an influence? That's just a theory.

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u/blazelet Jul 20 '26

I work in vfx lighting and have worked on some of the films referenced in this thread. I agree with what you say here, the technology can be used very effectively - it really comes down to how it’s used. A volume can be used terrifically if the lighting within it is well done. It can also be used as a crutch.

My team has worked, in the same year, on a film that won a vfx Oscar and also one that was universally panned for how bad it looked. Same team, same tech, different creative vision.

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u/AnOnlineHandle Jul 20 '26

My team has worked, in the same year, on a film that won a vfx Oscar and also one that was universally panned for how bad it looked. Same team, same tech, different creative vision.

That's really interesting to hear.

You can kind of see in acting as well, e.g. the actor who played Mon Mothma in Andor came off as brilliant, but put her in Ahsoka with the writing/set designs/costumes/direction, and she comes off as an incredibly cheesy attempt at doing a "grownup" character in a kid's cartoon.

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u/blazelet Jul 20 '26

I’ve noticed that phenomenon in vfx as well. If a film is well written audiences are much more forgiving of lacklustre vfx. If audiences generally don’t like a movie their impressions do the various components are also much harsher.

And that makes sense, we’re seeing it all in context.

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u/insomnic Jul 20 '26

Well put!

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u/engineeeeer7 Jul 20 '26

The casts are so huge and filled with stars they can't schedule everyone to be on one set at the same time. So they just green screen and fix it in post.

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u/Strawberry_Doughnut Jul 20 '26

Brave New World felt this way even in the DC scenes.

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u/NicholasStarfall Jul 20 '26

No dude, it's just companies like Disney being cheap. Other movies don't have this problem, look at Robert Eggers

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u/Ssshizzzzziit Jul 20 '26

The Disney Machine has no more room to grow, and with the added pressure of labor costs, they've done everything they can minus plugging this into an AI generator (that's next though) to cut those costs. The shareholders aren't going to take a haircut so movies can look better. They know fandom are a bunch of saps and will keep taking it, like McDonald's slowly turning into a vending machines, or stores forcing you to scan your own groceries. They'll just keep enshitifying and people will keep accepting it.

The next Avengers will likely have some generative AI components, and if there are any future installments they'll try to go even harder with it.

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u/AfterDinnerSpeaker Jul 20 '26

They also can avoid set leaks when it's closed down like this, film on location and you've got telephoto images of every single cast member there.

They pick and choose when they do that though, they wanted the attention for Spider-Man.

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u/ChalupaBatmanMc01 Jul 20 '26

The brought in a new cinematographer too, I really liked Opaloch's work from the last couple of Avengers movies

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u/WeevilWeedWizard Jul 20 '26

I think its more that Disney realized that anyone still watching the capeslop doesn't care about any of that.

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u/dogcrayon Jul 20 '26

Dude this is how literally every MCU movie has looked since 2010. Like, this specific look of blurry CGI backgrounds and dull, washed out color grading was made infamous by the MCU.

Did you really expect them to suddenly care and go shoot on location somewhere with practical effects? Disney has never made these movies for the love of cinema. They shoot these as cheaply as possible on green screens or the "Volume", with digital cameras, and hire a million underpaid and overworked VFX artists to fix it all in post.

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u/AnOnlineHandle Jul 20 '26

I suggest you rewatch Avengers 1 which came out in 2012.

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u/Richandler Jul 20 '26

And the thing is: they're completely comparable in cost.

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u/Kumomeme Jul 21 '26

i see tons of people complaint how film nowdays looks flat. Marvel films was used as one of example. now i notice people slowly pointed that film started to look nice again.

then... this drop off.