2020s

At birth the Black Widow (aka Natasha Romanova) is given to the KGB, which grooms her to become its ultimate operative. When the U.S.S.R. breaks up, the government tries to kill her as the action moves to present-day New York, where she is a freelance operative. The standalone film will find Romanoff living in the United States 15 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In Twentieth Century Studios’ epic adventure-comedy “Free Guy,” a bank teller discovers he’s actually a non-playable character in a brutal open-world video game, so he does what any logical NPC would do: he rewrites the story and becomes the hero. Now in a world run amok where there are no limits, he’s determined to be the guy to save his own world—his way—before time runs out.

ILM’s work on Shawn Levy’s Free Guy was overseen by visual effects supervisors Paolo Acri and Russel Earl, where they rose to the challenge of bringing a veritable toybox of references to life from across movies and video games. Keep your eyes peeled and you’ll find nods to both Star Wars and the MCU, and even Halo and Fortnite. 

In addition to crafting (and destroying) buildings and environments, ILM was also tasked with rapidly prototyping a bevy of diverse assets for the film: including hero digi-doubles, vehicles, and everything in-between; of course, by “in-between”, we’re talking about dragons, centaurs, mecha-walkers, and unicorns. Another exciting challenge that ILM tackled were the dazzling portal effects for the film, building them up from multiple layers of sims to create an end-effect that looked brilliant in both darkness and in light.

F9 is the ninth chapter in the Fast & Furious Saga, which has endured for two decades and has earned more than $5 billion around the world.

Vin Diesel’s Dom Toretto is leading a quiet life off the grid with Letty and his son, little Brian, but they know that danger always lurks just over their peaceful horizon. This time, that threat will force Dom to confront the sins of his past if he’s going to save those he loves most. His crew joins together to stop a world-shattering plot led by the most skilled assassin and high-performance driver they’ve ever encountered: a man who also happens to be Dom’s forsaken brother, Jakob (John Cena).

F9 sees the return of Justin Lin as director, who helmed the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters of the series when it transformed into a global blockbuster. The action hurtles around the globe—from London to Tokyo, from Central America to Edinburgh, and from a secret bunker in Azerbaijan to the teeming streets of Tbilisi. Along the way, old friends will be resurrected, old foes will return, history will be rewritten, and the true meaning of family will be tested like never before.

From Warner Bros. Pictures comes The Batman with director Matt Reeves at the helm and with Robert Pattinson starring as Gotham City’s vigilante detective, Batman, and billionaire Bruce Wayne.

The Batman was written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig. Reeves and Dylan Clark are producing the film. Reeves’ behind-the-scenes creative team includes Oscar-nominated director of photography Greig Fraser; his “Planet of the Apes” production designer, James Chinlund; editors William Hoyand and Tyler Nelson; Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Dan Lemmon; Oscar-nominated SFX supervisor Dominic Tuohy; Oscar-nominated sound mixer Stuart Wilson; Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran and costume designers Glyn Dillon and David Crossman; hair designer Zoe Tahir; and Oscar-nominated makeup designer Naomi Donne.

For George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, ILM provided virtual production services via ILM StageCraft as well as post visual effects work. Our visual effects team was responsible for terrestrial visual effects work depicting the fictional Barbeau Observatory and views from within as well as the lake crossing and flashback sequences.

ILM’s StageCraft team and on-set visual effects supervisor worked closely with Clooney, production designer Jim Bissell, and cinematographer Martin Ruhe to construct a bespoke StageCraft LED installation built into the set itself. The team captured real photography of Iceland’s Vatnajökull glacier which served as the backdrop for all views out the windows of the observatory and also provided naturalistic lighting for the scene itself. In all, four different times of day were captured, daytime, nighttime, dawn, and dusk, and a digital survey was also conducted to allow the StageCraft team to manipulate the environment and event the amount and density of the snowfall in three dimensions tracked to the director’s camera. Overall StageCraft allowed the production to capture 100 of the visual effects shots in-camera. Using a traditional greenscreen approach would have yielded far less effective shots as the interactive reflections lent a high degree of realism to the scenes.

The captivating new series WandaVision, starring Elizabeth Olsen and Paul Bettany, marks the first series from Marvel Studios streaming exclusively on Disney+. The series is a blend of classic television and the Marvel Cinematic Universe in which Wanda Maximoff and Vision—two super-powered beings living idealized suburban lives—begin to suspect that everything is not as it seems.

Mank follows screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz’s tumultuous development of Orson Welles’ iconic masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941). ILM contributed a series of shots to the film including the various animals housed at the Hearst Castle private zoo. ILM created a host of photo-real CG animals to complete the scenes featuring capuchin monkeys, giraffe, elephants, and their environs such as the ornate wrought-iron victorian-era monkey’s enclosure and the gated grass area housing the roaming elephants and giraffe.

Since the film was shot in black and white, ILM’s paint and roto team had their work cut out for them. The actors and foreground elements were meticulously rotoscoped and extracted so compositors could incorporate the environments, animals, and sky replacements behind them all fully art directed by David Fincher himself.