MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios

by JoAnna Robinson

Rhythm & Hues, for example, had been a key contributor of CGI to Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk in 2008, but it was driven into bankruptcy by a pair of 2012 films: Snow White and the Huntsman and a movie for which it won an Academy Award, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. That movie largely took place on a lifeboat holding a teenage boy and an adult Bengal tiger; the tiger was entirely digital, created by Rhythm & Hues. The VFX house got the job for the tiger with a fixed-rate bid, meaning that it committed to a price tag before work began. When the movie was delayed and Lee wanted to change the design of the tiger in postproduction, Rhythm & Hues had to swallow the costs of overages. “Twenty months of delays at $1.2 million to $1.6 million per month is anywhere from $24 million to $30 million of additional costs,” said Rhythm & Hues founder James Hughes. At the Oscars ceremony in early 2013, the visual team accepting the award declared that Rhythm & Hues was going bankrupt because of its work on that movie—and then was played offstage by the Jaws theme. The company shuttered completely in 2020.