Epic responds to director Gore Verbinski's claims that Unreal Engine is making movie CGI worse: 'aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software'

Director Gore Verbinski was asked recently about something a lot of movie fans have been pondering: does CGI in movies look worse now than it used to? And if so, why?

Verbinski, who directed the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, the American remake of The Ring, and animated Western comedy Rango, was pretty blunt in pinning the blame on Epic's Unreal Engine, which has been used more and more for visual effects in film and television in the past several years, including the Fallout TV series.

"I think the simplest answer is you've seen the Unreal gaming engine enter the visual effects landscape," Verbinski said in an interview with pop culture site But Why Tho?. "I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards."

Epic Games has now responded to Verbinski's statement. In an email sent to PC Gamer, Patrick Tubach, VFX supervisor at Epic Games, said:

"It’s inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI. It's true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures—but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software."

Prior to joining Epic Games as VFX supervisor in 2022, Tubach worked at Industrial Light & Magic as a visual effects supervisor, and has worked on movies like Transformers and Star Trek Into Darkness. He also worked as a digital composer and artist on Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean films.

"Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases final pixels," Tubach said. "I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done—and I should know—I was one of them!"