10 Surprising Reasons Movie Scenes Were Ruined
2. The Rock's Demanding WWE Schedule Ruined The CGI Scorpion King - The Mummy Returns
The Mummy Returns may not be a particularly good movie, but pretty much all anyone can remember is the atrocious third act sequence in which Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) faces off against the Scorpion King - a grotesque fusion of man (Dwayne Johnson) and oversized scorpion.
The visual effects work on the creature is bad, to be kind, less resembling Johnson than a crude waxwork of him awkwardly pasted onto a 3D model from a PS2 game.
Even back in 2001 it looked rough, and in a recent episode of Corridor Crew's VFX Artists React, the film's visual effects supervisor, John Berton Jr., talked about what went wrong with the scene.
Berton explained that, due to Johnson's busy WWE career, the VFX team weren't able to bring him in and scan his face in order to collect ultra-detailed reference material.
As a result, the VFX artists were effectively left to figure it out for themselves and, without precise lighting and animation references to draw from, the results were staggeringly unconvincing.
As much as so many have laid the blame at the feet of the hard-working VFX artists, it's really a wider production issue, that time wasn't allotted to bring Johnson in for scanning.