"Fundamentally, visual effects is a crappy business," James Cameron told me when I interviewed him for my book, The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron. "You don't make much of a margin. A good year for us was 5%. Sure, we were doing huge volume but at a low margin." In 1998, after the VFX company he helped start, Digital Domain, won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work on Titanic, Cameron resigned amid dispute about its direction.
For VFX houses, there may be a dramatic Hollywood ending. With effects-heavy movies like the forthcoming Batman sequel, The Hobbit, Thor and Green Lantern coming down the pike, the demand for VFX may overwhelm the industry's diminished capacity. The changing nature of the work could alter the balance of power too: being a gifted designer is becoming more important than being a technical whiz. Says analyst Alan Lasky: "The minute you see one of these movies not make its release date due to this capacity crisis, then you'll start to see some interesting changes in the industry." Who knows? Maybe someday an effects artist will even get star billing.
...excerpts above from article in Time Magazine
Read more: Hollywood's VFX Sweatshops - Time Magazine