What 10 Great Movies Look Like Without Visual Effects

9. Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War is one of the most ambitious blockbusters of all time - at least until Endgame came along - and in order to fully deliver the superhero team-up extravaganza audiences were expecting, the Russo brothers employed a mind-boggling 2,900 visual effects shots throughout the film.

By far the most complex aspect of Infinity War from a technical perspective was translating Josh Brolin's performance capture work as Thanos into a convincing digital rendering while retaining the tactile qualities of Brolin's performance.

After all, we've all witnessed how bad CGI can ruin a potentially compelling feat of performance capture (looking at you, Justice League).

As extensive B-roll footage of the shoot makes clear, Infinity War's effects team also had to deal with the size differential between Thanos and Brolin, by attaching a pole to Brolin's performance capture suit in order to give the artists a reference for Thanos' head.

To further lessen the technical load, very few elements in Thanos' scenes are actually practical, bar a few environmental objects and the actors he's working opposite. This gives the artists as much freedom as possible to figure out the precise geometry of Thanos' spatial positioning relative to Brolin.

Though it wouldn't quite be fair to call Thanos a seamless creation - he is a giant purple alien, after all - the villain's uncommon expressiveness is an undeniable triumph for the genre, and for blockbuster filmmaking as a whole.