How VFX Pros Transformed Worlds and Faces With Visual Effects

Without a juggernaut such as Avatar: The Way of Water in the running — and schedule changes that pushed big tentpoles, notably Dune 2, back to 2024 — this season’s visual effects Oscar race is shaping up to be a competitive one. The road to a nomination begins with a committee of branch members who meet to discuss qualified work and create a shortlist of 10 films that will be announced Dec. 21. These films will participate in a January “bake-off,” during which VFX teams from each of the movies present a show-and-tell and answer questions from branch members before they vote on which five films to nominate for the VFX Oscar.

One from the sci-fi arena that seems to have an assured place on the shortlist is Gareth Edwards’ The Creator from Searchlight. The work of production VFX supervisor Jay Cooper and the rest of the team at lead VFX studio Industrial Light & Magic included the futuristic world, artificial intelligence-driven robots that co-exist with humans and “simulant” characters, melding actors with CG mechanical components. 

In the superhero realm, expect to see at least one Marvel movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, most likely. The MCU has had at least one VFX nominated movie in eight of the past 10 years (one exception was 2020, when the studio didn’t release a movie because of the pandemic). Typically, the strongest Marvel contenders are the ones that are best received by critics and fans (a year ago, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was nominated). According to twice Oscar-nominated production VFX supervisor Stephane Ceretti, Guardians 3 involved 3,066 visual effects shots (shared by roughly 10 VFX companies) and required key character animation as the story focuses on Rocket’s past. 

DC Films earned a nomination last season (for The Batman) and has multiple releases this year, including Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash, Blue Beetle and, still to open, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, whose large amount of water work could give it an edge.

Outside the superhero genre, action films vying for a place on the shortlist include Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One. Production VFX supervisor Alex Wuttke reports that there are some 3,600 VFX shots in the movie, a “tight partnership between the practical and the digital.” This includes a car chase through Rome and the climactic train wreck. And just as this production was not able to film at the actual Spanish Steps, the team on John Wick: Chapter 4 also used VFX to put its action at, for instance, Paris’ Arc de Triomphe. Fast X also relied on VFX for its action scenes, which included one sequence set in Rome.

It’s difficult to rule out the year’s box office champ, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, with its carefully crafted Barbie Land. In all, the movie contains 1,300 VFX shots. Also among the tentpoles, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny might grab a spot on the shortlist, in part because of ILM’s de-aging of Harrison Ford by 40 years for the 1944-set prologue. Other tentpole possibilities include The Little Mermaid, with its underwater sequences; Transformers: Rise of the Beasts; Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves; The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and the still-to-open Wonka.

Other likely shortlist contenders are the dramas with “invisible” effects, including Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. (Yes, despite early confusion in the press, his biographical drama about the father of the atomic bomb does contain VFX.) Nolan’s movies tend to do well in this category — Tenet, Interstellar and Inception all won visual effects Academy Awards — and the director once again turned to VFX supervisor Andrew Jackson (who won an Oscar for Tenet and whose upcoming work includes next summer’s Furiosa) and Nolan’s go-to VFX vendor, DNEG.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon could follow in the footsteps of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was Oscar-nominated earlier this year for the VFX of its period battles. Napoleon included ILM’s VFX work on the Battle of Austerlitz, which involved the snowy environment, armies, musket and cannon fire, explosions and underwater shots as soldiers fall through ice.

For 1920s-set Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese reteamed with his Irishman-nominated production VFX supervisor Pablo Helman and lead VFX house ILM. According to Helman, the work included adding oil rigs and workers in the fields, and encompassed re-creating a 1920s version of Oklahoma’s Fairfax city train station, as well as Tulsa and Washington, D.C. — not to mention the blood and firearm effects related to the murders in the film. Other such contenders might include Michael Mann’s Ferrari with its race scenes and a chilling crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia.

Another shortlist possibility is Universal’s Cocaine Bear — remember that a photo­real CG bear and its tussle with Leonardo DiCaprio helped deliver a category nom to the 2015 feature The Revenant. 

Lastly, Sony Pictures Animation is pushing its bold computer-animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse in the VFX category, where historically very few animated movies have made the shortlist. To date, only 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings (both stop-motion) have earned VFX Oscar noms, plus Jon Favreau’s 2019 The Lion King (if you are among those who consider this an animated movie). The Spider-Man team highlights the handcrafted aesthetics of its created worlds, which Spider-Man’s VFX supervisor Michael Lasker says “required reinventing virtually every aspect of the filmmaking process.” 

This story first appeared in a December standalone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.