When you hear the phrase ‘CGI costume in a superhero movie,’ most people tend to have flashbacks to Ryan Reynolds’ terribly animated outfit in Green Lantern, something the actor himself would go on to poke fun at in Deadpool. However, with the advances in technology, a lot of costumes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been very convincingly created using visual effects, making it increasingly difficult to know where the practical ends and the digital begins.
While it’s obviously heavily used during the action sequences, even when it comes to minor closeups and dialogue scenes, Marvel Studios have used CGI to either partially or entirely create the costumes for Iron Man, War Machine, Spider-Man and Black Panther on the big screen, while Brie Larson’s hair was added to Avengers: Endgame in post-production.
As a millennia-spanning cosmic adventure centered on a race of immortal aliens, The Eternals was always going to feature a heavy amount of computer-generated trickery, and now it turns out that even one of the few major human characters will have his superhero threads created via special effects.
Tipster Daniel Richtman claims that Chloe Zao’s blockbuster sci-fi faced a rushed pre-production schedule, which saw them start shooting without completed sets, costumes or even a finished script, and specifically mentions that Kit Harington’s Black Knight costume was among the unfinished items when most of his scenes were shot, leading to the vast majority of his look being created through CGI.
If true, then it might turn out to be a good thing in the end that The Eternals was pushed back by three months as part of Marvel’s reshuffling of the entirety of Phase Four, giving the crew additional time to make sure that the effects are as strong as they possibly can be. After all, few things pull you out of the cinematic experience quicker than underwhelming CGI.