10 Recent Movies That Grossly Overestimated What Their CGI Could Do

6. Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle

Andy Serkis' Jungle Book movie Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle ended up being dumped on Netflix late last year after Warner Bros. realised its commercial prospects were dead in the water.

Yet despite going direct-to-streaming, Mowgli clearly boasted a titanic, blockbuster-worthy budget, as evidenced by the complexity of its impressive digital landscapes and cast predominantly comprised of CGI animals realised through performance capture.

And while the technology is undeniably impressive, Serkis' attempt to combine a realistic-looking animal with the face of their actor also reveals the limitations of these tools, creating a jarring uncanny valley effect that's majorly offputting.

Case in point, Christian Bale's Bagheera (above) clearly inherits the eyes and facial structure of the actor himself, yet in a way where Bagheera doesn't so much look like a panther as he does a creepy abomination lab experiment.

Compare it to the more realistic CGI animals in Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book - which similarly used performance capture yet more subtly integrated the human into the animal - and there's no contest between the two.

The ambition can't be faulted here, but from both a technical and design perspective, it just couldn't pass muster.