Captain Marvel is still making waves, having soared past a huge box office milestone this past weekend; it continues to rake in the bucks, breaking the $900 million mark. Of course, a big part of any movie’s success is the chemistry between its stars and in this case, that’s Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers and Goose the Flerken.
Just like Fury didn’t realize the cat was really an alien though, it’s likely that we the audience didn’t realize just how many of Goose’s scenes were CGI. In fact, around 80% of Goose’s screen time was computer animated. In an interview with The Huffington Post, VFX technician Chris Townsend filled us in on a little-known fact about the film, saying:
“There are about over 100 shots of the cat in the film, 70 or 80 of them are CG.”
He then went on to explain that even Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the movie’s directors, couldn’t tell the real cat from the fake.
Any cat owner surely gets it; felines would make terrible actors. They do what they want, they’re skittish, and I repeat, they do whatever. They. Want. Townsend actually told of an instance during Captain Marvel concerning one of the four different trained cats (is that even possible?) not cooperating on set, saying:
“Sometimes they’d be in the cockpit of the plane, and Ben Mendelsohn’s character would be sitting there in a big leather coat. The leather would creak and the cat would freak out on Sam Jackson’s lap. So, there was an awful lot of replacement of the cat throughout the film.”
With Avengers: Endgame hitting theaters on April 26th, let’s just hope they include Goose in the movie; one huge Flerken chomp and Thanos would soon be a big pile of clumpy purple kitty litter.