Four of the top contenders for the 2026 visual effects Oscar boldly reimagine beloved worlds or characters. For “Superman” and “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” the VFX teams created bright, idiosyncratic visions of two of the most famous comic-book franchises. The remake “How to Train Your Dragon” translated beloved computer animation to live action and the sequel “Tron: Ares” downloaded elements from a digital domain to the flesh-and-blood world.
Making ‘Superman’ fun again
For writer-director James Gunn’s warmer, more optimistic take on “Superman,” a core mantra was “How do we keep it fun?”
“When Guy Gardner [Nathan Fillion as the notoriously caustic Green Lantern] uses his powers, there is a playfulness,” says visual effects supervisor Stephane Ceretti. “Guy creates oven mitts to capture this kaiju. When he sweeps away the tanks, we didn’t originally have him using [a giant] middle finger, but it works.”
For the flying scenes, they employed the “volume” — the recent technology that surrounds physical elements of sets with giant LED screens displaying the environments of the scene (say, another planet or the city of Metropolis, blazing by at breakneck speeds seen by a character in flight). That choice allowed star David Corenswet to react in real time to his filmed environment, rather than shooting him before a blue screen and later superimposing him over footage.
For the shocking message from Superman’s Kryptonian parents that upends his entire identity, “We used a very cutting-edge technique called ‘4D Gaussian splatting’ that allows us to record a real hologram,” says Ceretti. “We had 192 cameras that recorded them from all different angles — close, far — at the same time. It had never been used before in a film.”
But the visual effect that best expresses the movie’s “punk” personality might be Krypto, the superdog — or superbad dog.
“James said he cracked the code — ‘My dog is a bad dog and Krypto’s going to be a bad dog,’” says Ceretti, laughing.
How to train your dragon for a live-action remake
To convert the CG-animated “How to Train Your Dragon” to live action, all filmmakers had to do was risk life and limb in helicopters and find, you know, dragons.
VFX supervisor Christian Manz says they used a mix of real animals as reference points: “Toothless might look like a black salamander/dragon, but he behaves like a cat or a panther. A lot of it was about how to ground them, become scene partners with real actors. Hopefully people don’t even think about” the dragons being CG.
Once they seemed real, they had to fly as compellingly as in the 2010 original.
“A lot of it was driven by the cinematography, working with Bill Pope,” he says. “We looked at a bunch of stuff Tom Cruise has done because, often, it’s being done for real. ‘What would you be doing if you were trying to film this?’
“Actually flying around in a helicopter with [director Dean DeBlois] and Bill when we were reckying [reconnoitering] everything — we wanted to transfer how we felt, zooming through canyons and things. That’s why ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ works, because they’re in those planes. In those flying sequences, you had to feel it.”
From the new ‘grid’ to the real world and back to the old grid
“Tron: Ares” VFX supervisor David Seager had two main challenges in the franchise’s third film — bringing elements from the updated digital domain to the flesh-and-blood world, and revisiting the limitations of the 1982 original.
“I’ve been calling it ‘visual effects haiku,’” says Seager. “Trying to get to the core of what makes it look like the 1982 “grid”; in many cases it was turning things off.
“Back in the day, you had to really work hard to do all these fancy techniques. Now it was like, ‘Nope, turn that off, turn that off’ and introducing what we now consider errors.”
But how to transplant characters and vehicles from the physics-defying grid to the real world? “Let’s shoot it as real as possible. We’re going to go on location and shoot a light cycle chase.”
They modified electric Harley-Davidsons to shoot a “more traditional, spy film, motorcycle chase scene,” then replaced them in post with the futuristic light cycles. “It looks real because they shot it for real — all those little camera operations, adjusting to a stunt performer braking to go around a car — then we made it a visual-effects problem.”
Giant steps toward a gleaming retro-future
For the sparkling, retro-future “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” VFX supervisor Scott Stokdyk’s team painstakingly crafted an alternative New York City blending 1960s architecture with out-of-this-world, “Jetsons”-like futurism. But fans of Marvel’s First Family will most appreciate how “First Steps” expresses the team’s superpowers.
For instance, for Sue Storm / the Invisible Woman’s force fields and invisibility, Stokdyk found that director Matt Shakman responded to “Things that looked optical, like multiple exposures of photography, prismatic light,” resulting in the first big-screen depiction of Sue’s powers to convey their basis in light.
For the most spectacular sequence, with the heroes perilously near a neutron star, the filmmakers checked in with astrophysicist Cliff Johnson weekly. Among the nuggets he shared: “There’s a lensing effect that expands things out and warps things out in a very interesting way,” which affects our view of the stars around it. “He worked with us on the color palette too.”
But the biggest challenge in that sequence, says Stokdyk, was Sue’s zero-G hair. Bemoaning previous techniques and the paucity of usable real-world references, he laughs and says, “We had our breakthrough when Katy Perry went up!”
