10 Movies That Ruined Awesome Cinematic Tricks

There have been few more promising filmmaking tech innovations in recent years than StageCraft - that is, replacing green screens with large, high-resolution video walls which can create ultra-realistic backgrounds for filming.

Beyond the benefit of having the actor situated in a recognisable environment rather than a green screen, StageCraft also ensures the actors are lit correctly, while allowing technicians to dynamically tweak and alter backgrounds per a filmmaker's requirements.

It's extremely impressive technology and has been put to terrific use on Disney's The Mandalorian above all else. It ensures that directors know precisely how a camera setup will look before they get into post, rather than simply hoping that the green screen compositing ends up looking good.

Inevitably, Disney started recently branching out and using StageCraft for their film shoots, most notably Thor: Love and Thunder, which used higher-resolution video walls than The Mandalorian.

But Love and Thunder also exposed one of the major limitations of StageCraft: the wraparound video wall is relatively small compared to a more conventional set space, and so not particularly well-suited to scenes involving lots of characters.

In Love and Thunder, the StageCraft scenes end up drawing a fair amount of attention to themselves, the characters largely being crammed into the frame to suit the specs of the LED wall setup.

This is especially true during the opening battle where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) teams up with the Guardians of the Galaxy - it lacks the dimensionality and sprawling quality you'd expect from a large battlefield, feeling oddly small-scale by comparison.

Compare this implementation to StageCraft's use in The Batman, which proved earlier this year how brilliantly it could be used for small environments - such as the roof where Batman (Robert Pattinson) meets Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) - while employing an artfully shallow depth of field.

It doesn't really feel appropriate for splashier tentpoles like Love and Thunder, though, and while StageCraft remains a hugely impressive achievement, it's never going to make green screen totally obsolete.