Clients decide who gets the work, but demand for VFX is driven by audiences.
I was recently in a meeting where an investor asked top management from a major VFX studio what would happen to their business if Marvel went away. Marvel was their biggest customer, and a key part of the management team’s ambitious growth plan for the next few years.
It’s a hypothetical question, of course. Marvel, with Disney behind them, is about as safe a bet for big VFX work as you’ll find. It’s tempting simply to dismiss the question and say, “well, that just isn't going to happen”. We can come up with more insightful answers, though.
If Marvel magically vanished, other content producers would step in to feed the world’s appetite for superhero movies. We might see a few more DC movies each year. Less well-known superhero properties would be dusted off and turned into movies. The superhero genre has been part of pop culture for over a century. As long as audiences continue to find superheroes interesting, VFX companies are going to stay busy, with or without Marvel.
Even if Marvel the business entity disappeared, their army of client-side VFX practitioners would disperse across the industry, taking their favorite VFX studio relationships with them. When I worked in TV VFX, colleagues dreaded the cancellation of TV shows on which we were working. In fact, our clients from the cancelled show ended up working on several different shows and bringing us along on many of them.
To be fair to Marvel, they deserve credit for having a plan. The reveal of MCU Phases 5 and 6 at San Diego Comic-Con this year is a tremendous display of confidence in their brand, their audience, and their financial backing. Along with unprecedented demand and competition for VFX resources in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, this finally gives VFX studios the visibility to plan properly for the next few years. It must be game-changing for DNEG to know that they can count on Netflix to send them $350M of VFX work between now and 2025.
The future of a VFX studio doesn’t rest in the hands of any one client, even ones as big as Marvel or Netflix. Healthy client relationships travel from company to company with happy clients. We’ll see demand for VFX ebb and flow with cultural relevance and economic conditions, but our product will remain in demand for as long as people enjoy experiencing stories through motion pictures.
