Chapter 706: Fifty-Cent Special Effects

"A true hero needs more than just combat power," Duke said, raising his right hand to point at his chest. "They also need an unwavering resolve."

According to the script, Furiosa was a woman of action. Behind her series of actions lay an incredibly formidable heart.

After years of being bombarded by superhero movies, debates like "who would win in a fight between Batman and Iron Man" never seemed to get old. When it came to superheroes, everyone's focus seemed to rest solely on combat power. The rich relied on technology, while the poor relied on mutation; those with superpowers stepped up, and those without threw money at the problem until they could. In short, superheroes were just a bunch of guys who could fight better than ordinary people.

But it was easy to forget that supervillains were also a bunch of rich, superpowered, and sometimes even more formidable guys than the protagonists. Ninja Master, Lex Luthor, Hydra, or Ultron—which of them didn't burn through money and risk their lives to outdo the hero's team?

Heroes became heroes not just because of their strength in battle, but because they possessed powerful hearts.

The sentiment was a cliché, but it was exactly this point that drove Iron Man to abandon his identity as an arms dealer and don the Iron Armor, pushed Batman to peel away his playboy mask and become The Dark Knight, and spurred Spider-Man to save the world in his spare time between classes and part-time jobs while flat broke.

They didn't protect the world because they were stronger than ordinary people. Rather, their unyielding convictions and determination to fight drove them to strive to become stronger.

Hearing this, Charlize Theron wore a thoughtful expression. She pondered for a few minutes before saying, "Furiosa is arguably the most brilliant of all the female characters I've ever encountered. It's exactly as you say. The character stands out not because she has greater combat power, but because in the movie, she is shaped first and foremost as an independent person—someone who doesn't exist just to fall in love with the male lead. Only secondarily is she a woman."

Fury Road completely bucked the trend of modern sci-fi films. Even Duke had to admit that despite Agent Natasha Romanoff's consecutive appearances in the Marvel Series and her immense importance to the franchise, she actually served primarily as a foil for the men. In the two films she appeared in, the world would still have been saved without Black Widow.

Black Widow's image was also rather one-dimensional: "beautiful and sexy"—the audience's impression of her fell into a rigid stereotype of "curvaceous with a great figure, superb combat skills, and a cool personality," completely ignoring the practical issue of whether dressing like that on a battlefield would actually be a hindrance.

Furiosa, however, was different, and Duke had planned it that way from the start. Throughout the film, despite having a beautiful face, her head would be shaved clean; despite having long legs, they would remain wrapped in pants without being revealed even once.

Basically, she received the same treatment as Tom Cruise, who never burst out of his shirt despite his muscular physique. Her character arc had essentially nothing to do with whether she was a girl or not. She shared a seamless chemistry with the male lead—even outshining him—and, quite logically, didn't stop to fall in love at a critical juncture while war raged.

During the final few years of Duke's past life, there was a reason countless moviegoers loved shipping the male characters in superhero films: that profound bond of trusting someone with your back in a life-or-death situation. The synergy of one man charging the front lines while the other provided sniper cover from afar was infinitely more thrilling than a male lead rescuing a princess and engaging in a contrived hookup!

Afterward, Duke and Charlize Theron visited the special effects department. A mechanical arm, custom-designed to match Charlize's body proportions, was already prepared.

With the help of two staff members, Charlize Theron finally put on the mechanical prosthetic arm.

She turned the fake arm over to inspect it, then said to Duke, "Not only am I bald, but I'm also missing an arm."

Duke shrugged but didn't reply to her comment. In truth, the reasoning was simple: for a woman to climb to such a high rank in a post-apocalyptic world, she inevitably had to sacrifice far more than a man.

These settings also aligned perfectly with typical Hollywood tropes. In Hollywood films, the future was either a beautiful utopia or a descent into apocalyptic madness.

After seeing Charlize Theron off, Duke gathered Anna Printz and the others in the screening room. Together, they reviewed the footage from the second round of auditions and finalized the cast for the remaining major roles.

The five Angels from Victoria's Secret were the first to receive unanimous approval. Their characters served primarily as visual embellishments in the film.

The casting for the remaining two vital roles was also basically locked in. James Franco would play the "War Boy," Nux, and Anthony Hopkins would star as the main villain boss, Immortan Joe.

Of course, this would only be set in stone after Charles Roven finished negotiating with their agents.

The dialogue-driven drama in this film was so scarce it could practically be ignored. Nearly all of the pre-production work revolved around preparing for the action sequences.

After receiving Duke's approval, the vast array of prop vehicles rapidly entered the modification phase. However, customizing a staggering fleet of over 150 vehicles wasn't a task that could be finished in the short term. Duke gave the props team and other departments plenty of time, requiring only that the work be completed before principal photography began in December.

With Fury Road aiming to catch the Cannes Film Festival next May, time was still a bit tight. Duke had allocated eighty days for the shoot, but because many major stunts required practical filming on location, he was already mentally prepared for the production to run over schedule.

Shooting a film like this was exponentially more complex than filming those green-screen movies.

Duke didn't have anything against green-screen CG technology. In fact, he highly approved of the way it streamlined the filming process, recognizing it as the direction of future development.

The evolution of cinema had always been inextricably linked to technological advancement. Much like the progress of industrial productivity, this was something no one could stop.

However, compared to practical on-location shooting, sufficiently dazzling CG special effects often cost far more money.

It was a well-known fact that producing cinematic CGI special effects was a massive money sink, but exactly where was all that money spent? Just how much did a production have to spend to deliver satisfactory visual effects?

Creating visual effects drained funds on multiple fronts, with the largest portion going to labor costs. Blockbusters like Pirates of the Caribbean and Spider-Man routinely employed post-production teams numbering in the hundreds.

In Hollywood, the visual effects for many big-budget films were separately handled by upward of ten, or even more than twenty, VFX companies and studios. Many of them employed animators and compositors with years of work experience, so their salaries certainly wouldn't be low.

Furthermore, since the production cycles for many of these films could drag on for several years, the expenses were naturally substantial.

Put simply, great visual effects were built on mountains of cash.

In the country where Duke had lived in his past life, countless movies and television shows were mocked for having "fifty-cent special effects." In reality, the massive gap in quality didn't stem entirely from a lack of technology.

Hollywood VFX companies outsourced a significant number of their projects to studios all across the globe, including a portion produced right across the Pacific Ocean, so technological factors were never the key bottleneck.

Having struggled through the industry on the other side of the ocean, Duke knew perfectly well that this disparity mainly stemmed from two aspects.

The first was capital. Looking globally, the film industry of no other nation could match the sheer investment scale of mainstream Hollywood productions. The markets and audiences for those films dictated that film companies simply couldn't justify such massive budgets, and capital was the absolute key to producing special effects.

The second was production philosophy, which had an even greater impact than capital.

In mainstream Hollywood productions, using a green screen in place of practical shooting often meant spending more money, allocating more time for post-production, and pursuing an obsessive level of visual perfection. Conversely, in the industry Duke had previously worked in, directors or producers only turned to CGI when building a practical set proved too difficult or expensive. In their inherent mindset, this was merely a substitute meant to save time and money, so the final on-screen results could easily be imagined.

The visual effects industry had a very interesting quirk: to achieve eighty percent of the desired quality, twenty percent of the budget and time might be enough. However, securing that final twenty percent of quality often required draining eighty percent of the schedule and funds!

It could be said that principal photography accounted for only a very short fraction of a film's production cycle. Even someone like Duke, who could cheat, still had to spend several times the shooting schedule on pre-production and post-production. Sometimes he genuinely wondered how the films of those legendary directors—the ones rumored to skip pre-production entirely and breeze through post-production in just a few weeks—ever managed to succeed?

This was simply more of an unbelievable tall tale than an unbelievable tall tale.

Without meticulous pre-production and an immense investment of time, how could a film like Transformers ever achieve such spectacular visual effects?

The movie officially ended its theatrical run in North America in early November. After over five months of screening, the film had swept away $461.55 million from the North American market. For a non-sequel film, such a result was stellar enough.

Although Transformers hadn't matched The Dark Knight in the North American market, it was clearly far more popular overseas. To date, the film had grossed $768.77 million in international markets, pushing its global box office past the $1.2 billion milestone to reach $1,230.32 million, surpassing the global box office figure of The Dark Knight in one fell swoop.

Moreover, the overseas screening of Transformers hadn't ended yet, so its global box office figure still had room to grow further.

In terms of merchandise, the global popularity of Transformers also completely blew The Dark Knight out of the water. The differing settings and genres of the two films dictated the kind of treatment they could each enjoy in the global market.

Undeniably, The Dark Knight was more outstanding and brilliant, while Transformers leaned heavily toward popcorn entertainment, but The Dark Knight's overseas box office proved that outside of North America and English-speaking regions, it was somewhat unaccustomed to the climate.

Sometimes, a film's commercial performance was simply disproportionate to its actual quality.

Duke knew perfectly well that the commercial performance of Fury Road could never match that of Transformers or The Dark Knight. However, the film could still find a sufficient audience, so turning a profit wouldn't be an issue.

Once December arrived, he led a massive convoy of vehicles into New Mexico.