Director Gore Verbinski says Unreal Engine is 'the greatest slip backwards' for movie CGI

The squid-faced guy from Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest — (Image credit: 2006 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and Jerry Bruckheimer, Inc. Photo Credit: Industrial Light & Magic)

Recent updates

January 21: Epic has responded to Verbinski's statements about Unreal Engine, and you can read that response here.

Remember the glory days of CGI in movies? Terminator 2's liquid metal T-1000, Jurassic Park's stunning dinosaurs, Starship Trooper's swarms of giant arachnids. Not only did the CGI look great then, most of the visual effects in those movies still hold up well today, even decades after they were created.

In an interview with But Why Tho?, Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring, Rango, and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, was asked why visual effects in movies just don't look as good as they used to.

"I think the simplest answer is you’ve seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape," Verbinski said. "So it used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema."

Unreal Engine made waves after being used for virtual sets in production of The Mandalorian TV series back in 2020, and usage of the engine has grown more widespread in films over the past few years, such as in The Matrix Resurrections and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

That's not good news, according to Verbinski. "I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards," he said.

He pointed out the types of visual effects made with Unreal aren't necessarily bad. "It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint," he said.

"I just don’t think it takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way," he said. "So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand."

In his new movie, science fiction comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, which will be released in theaters in February, Verbinski says he uses CGI, but "we try to be really strict with making at least 50% of the frame photographic. I think that keeps you honest. You can use props as a reference, and when you see the CG replacement, you know how to replicate the real thing," he said.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.

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