10 Reasons Movie Scenes Turned Out THAT WAY
4. The Uncanny Valley Scorpion King - The Mummy Returns
Though the laughably bad CGI at the end of The Mummy Returns has been consistently ridiculed ever since the film's 2001 release, only recently did we learn precisely why it turned out this way.
The VFX blunder in question involves the final form of the Scorpion King (Dwayne Johnson) - a gaudy fusion of man and scorpion who, even for the time, looked absolutely horrible.
While such woeful results are usually due to a VFX team being given unrealistic deadlines to complete work, on a 2022 episode of Corridor Crew's VFX Artists React, The Mummy Returns' visual effects supervisor, John Berton Jr., revealed what really happened.
Ultimately, due to Dwayne Johnson being busy with his WWE wrestling career, the VFX team weren't able to meet with him and scan his face in order to collect detailed reference material, as is the standard for complex 3D characters such as this.
And so, the team were instead left to design The Scorpion King from scratch, without any of the expected high-res references of Johnson's face to work from.
And that's why the creature looks like such an uncanny valley abomination compared to most digital doubles of the era.