“One of the worst employers in the industry”: why no one wants to work with Marvel?

VFX artists collaborating with Marvel have been complaining about working with a collectively known studio. They dislike large amounts of work, low wages and the way employers treat artists.

It all started in May 2022 – then a Reddit user wrote a sad post about how he disliked working for Marvel Studios. “Collaboration with such a client is clearly overrated,” said an anonymous source. Backed up in the comments, adding that it’s “one of the worst employers in the industry.”

The studio is mostly complained about by visual effects artists.

A story of a failed collaboration with Marvel was posted on the Vulture website yesterday. Many of them have to work seven days a week – 64 hours a week – and in this mode for six months, sometimes a year. Usually, Marvel has a lot of editing on a project, so VFX artists have to redo their work multiple times.

“Marvel requires more regular changes than any other client,” says the source for the Vulture release.

Additionally, edits tend to come at the last minute – and you can’t delay them because the studio never reschedules the premiere date.

Visual effects artists are not directly assisted by filmmakers – directors and cameramen. Intuitively, you have to decide where to add this or that effect. You can’t expect cues from the customer either – Marvel reps never understand what they want. Often times the studio wants to try all the options – and this is in post production: “Some people want to change the whole setting, the whole place, already in the final stages of production.”

The way out of the situation would be for them to create special syndicates for visual effects artists. Also, the Vulture source says Marvel needs to better prepare its team members to be able to explain technical tasks.