What 10 Great Movies Look Like Without Visual Effects

1. The Avengers

The Avengers might seem quaint by recent MCU standards, but there's no denying the ingenuity of its climactic Battle of New York, which saw writer-director Joss Whedon call upon ILM to recreate New York digitally from the ground-up.

Despite how brilliantly the scene evokes the real New York, the majority of the sequence was actually shot on soundstages in New Mexico and Cleveland, with ILM recreating the city by mapping roughly 250,000 images of Manhattan.

That's not to forget that several of the superheroes - namely The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) - were kitted out in performance capture suits.

As such, watching the finished sequence must've been quite the exercise in cognitive dissonance for all involved.