10 Movie Scenes That Should've Used CGI
8. The Ship Crash - Speed 2: Cruise Control
Speed 2: Cruise Control climaxes with the runaway cruise ship crashing into an island, where it causes enormous damage to the pier and surrounding town.
Director Jan De Bont was fiercely determined to shoot the scene "for real" rather than using miniatures or CGI, spending a stonking $25 million - a quarter of the movie's entire budget - to build a life-size replica of the ship and have it driven on-rails through a purpose-built pier.
It sounds awesome in theory, but the reality is that the final scene mostly ends up looking like it was just shot with miniatures anyway, at which point you have to question why De Bont spaffed so much of his budget on doing it at scale.
CGI was certainly in an advanced enough state by 1997 - this being the same year that Titanic was released - to execute the ship crash effectively, and it probably wouldn't have been as costly or time-consuming as building a huge set and crashing a hydraulic ship into it.