I was reading about the minor controversy when Christopher Nolan had said that Oppenheimer had no CGI, and a number of people got bummed about it, including VFX artists who worked on the film. And while it's true that there wasn't any CGI used for the film (as in, no digital assets were built for it), I can understand why the statement caused some confusion, as obviously a lot of people conflate CGI and VFX to mean the same thing. VFX house DNEG did over 100 VFX shots on the film, mostly for compositing work (i.e., layering different shots of real explosions for the Trinity bomb test and digital cleanup, like removing modern elements from the background of shots that would have messed up the period piece aesthetic).
But it got me wondering: what is actually the highest-grossing film that uses no VFX? This sent me down a pretty interesting rabbit hole. Unsurprisingly, pretty much every film of the last 25 years uses at least some VFX, although I was a little shocked by just how much for some of the films that I thought might be strong contenders.
I was mainly looking for grounded dramas, biopics, and rom-coms, which seemed like the most likely genres to not need any VFX, but even some of these had a similar volume of effects shots to major fantasy and sci-fi films. For example, Mamma Mia was one of the first films on the highest-grossing list that I came across that seemed like a realistic potential contender, but it turned out to have well over 700 VFX shots, roughly the same amount as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and only just shy of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
I decided that maybe the best idea was to start looking at some of the older films on the list to see how they stacked up. Now, of course, VFX isn't a new invention. Optical visual effects have been used pretty much since the dawn of filmmaking, but I figured, as films tended to rely less heavily on it in the past, we might have better luck there.
The first film that began to significantly lower the threshold was The Sixth Sense, which used less than 50 VFX shots, shockingly low for a horror film, even at the time of its release. Mostly, these shots were just used for digital wire removal, as well as some digital enhancement of prosthetic makeup, but the strategy seemed to be working. I continued down the list, looking for major blockbusters before the turn of the century.
I almost hit a very satisfying answer with it being basically the film that defined the modern blockbuster as a thing to begin with, but it ever so narrowly missed the mark, and in an interesting way as well. Jaws uses almost no VFX of any kind. While digital effects did still exist (for example, one of the earliest cases of digital VFX in film was for Vertigo, where the basic computer in a World War II anti-aircraft gun was repurposed to create the trippy spirals in the opening sequence), they weren't yet in common use, and the film almost escapes using any optical VFX. The only exception is a brief few frames where a shooting star appears to flash over Brody in one shot. For a long while, it was speculated that this was actually a genuine serendipitous shooting star that had been captured on film, but it was actually revealed decades later to have been an optical effect that was drawn onto an animation cell and burned onto the film negative.
So our search must continue. Further down the list, there's another contender that only misses out by 6 frames. Pretty much every moment of the mayhem in Home Alone was achieved with stunt work and trick photography. The sole exception to this being that director Christopher Columbus couldn't think of a safe way to fire a BB gun at an actor's face for the iconic shot-through-the-doggy-door moment. Instead of sending it to an expensive professional VFX house to get this shot completed, Columbus instead recruited a local Chicago artist, who he paid $600 to hand-paint the BB pellet into six frames of the film.
We only have to go a few spots further down, though, to find what I would consider to be the true answer to the question. Because, coming in at the 320th highest-grossing film of all time as of writing this post, we have Pretty Woman. This film, as far as I can tell, uses nothing that would traditionally be considered VFX: no digital effects, no optical effects, no matte paintings, nothing like that.
However, I didn't feel entirely satisfied. Even though they wouldn't typically be considered VFX, the film still uses photochemical dissolves and has a title sequence, both of which require altering the existing film strip in much the same way that you would with any other visual effect. I wanted to keep looking for a true zero film, to cut out truly everything. I had to start looking for films that were shot in a unique style. A lot of films like this wouldn't traditionally be high grossers.
However, I had an idea for one exception. While it seems like 759th is remarkably far down the highest-grossing list to still find iconic, genre-defining movies, one of the most influential films of all time sits here. It actually makes a lot of sense that this film would feature not only no VFX, but really not anything that could be considered an alteration to the film from its raw format in any way. Because it pioneered the found-footage genre and was attempting to make viewers believe that it was genuinely recovered film, The Blair Witch Project features almost no alterations whatsoever. There aren’t even any dissolves, only hard cuts throughout the film. There are a couple of title graphics, but only ever white text on a black screen, typed directly in the editing software itself, without altering any existing film. For anything resembling a major budget Hollywood blockbuster, I think this is probably as close as you're going to get to no VFX. To be honest, though, I still wasn't satisfied, and I continued my pedantic deep dive from there, now with the expanded quest of looking for the highest-grossing film of all time that didn't use any editing whatsoever. I made a video essay on the whole quest, which I'll link here if you want to keep going.
Full video essay: https://youtu.be/VsJNLDL7E1w
All that to say, what do you think? Did I miss anything higher up that should actually be the answer? Interested to hear everyone’s perspectives
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