When was the Visual Effects business not in crisis?

From bankruptcies to breakthroughs, I crunched the numbers to find out when, if ever, VFX caught a break.

The visual effects industry is regularly portrayed as being in a near-permanent state of crisis.

Depending on when you check in, you might hear about studio bankruptcies, talent shortages, exploitative working conditions, or the latest technological shift threatening to upend everything. The question is not whether the VFX industry is in crisis, but rather which crisis it happens to be experiencing at any given moment.

In order to understand the topic a little better, I examined how the film trade press has covered the industry over time. Looking at articles in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Screen International from January 2008 to mid-March 2025, I found 21,914 articles that mention VFX in some capacity.

Only 3% of them explicitly discuss a problem or negative situation in the business of visual effects. But within that small fraction, the concerns are varied and significant.

Across these 656 articles, the industry’s challenges range from financial instability and labour exploitation to technological disruption, international competition, and talent shortages.

Visual effects have been blowing up

The visual effects industry has not just grown. It has multiplied.

When I looked at the topic of changing film roles in 2020, I found that some of the fastest-growing jobs in the entire film sector were in VFX.

As visual effects have become an integral part of mainstream filmmaking the scale of the teams involved has increased dramatically. The average film in 2018 hired four times as many VFX crew members as the average film in 2000.

This expansion is not just about the number of artists sitting at computers compositing explosions or animating creatures. The VFX industry includes a vast range of roles covering digital work management supervision, on-set effects, and technical direction.

The pattern of disruption in visual effects

The number of crisis-related articles about visual effects has fluctuated dramatically over the years. Some periods have been relatively quiet while others have seen a surge in reporting on industry problems.

The data reveals clear spikes in certain years, with 2013 standing out as the noisiest period by far, in large part due to the complicated collapse of Rhythm and Hues.

More recently, 2023 and 2024 saw another wave of crisis coverage, although the focus of the issues had shifted. Financial instability has always been a major topic, but in the past few years, there has been a sharp rise in articles covering management failures, labour disputes, and unionisation efforts.

Certain other years had far fewer articles discussing problems in VFX.

So perhaps the most direct answer to the question ‘When was the Visual Effects business not in crisis?’ is 2018 and 2021.

Let’s spend a moment to go a little deeper into the types of crisis we’re seeing in the coverage.

VFX businesses on shaky ground

The largest category was that of film journalists reporting on the financial instability of the visual effects business model.

In 2013, Rhythm and Hues filed for bankruptcy shortly before winning an Oscar for Life of Pi. Despite a full slate of work and support from major studios, the company folded under delayed payments, high overheads and unsustainable contracts.

This was not an isolated case. Digital Domain collapsed in 2012 after overextending itself financially. LookFX shut down in 2014 following losses on Noah. Even large companies like Sony Imageworks have regularly downsized in response to shifting incentives and rising costs.

In recent years, the cycle has repeated. DNEG introduced staff cuts and pay reductions amid production delays and shrinking budgets. But the most high-profile failure came last month when Technicolor entered administration. The company owned several major VFX brands including MPC and The Mill.

Technicolor had expanded rapidly but struggled with debt, missed deadlines and a drop in demand after the writers and actors strikes. Over 440 staff lost their jobs in the UK alone.

As with Rhythm and Hues, the collapse of Technicolor shows that delivering acclaimed work is no protection against financial ruin in VFX.

A workforce under pressure

Labour issues have been one of the most persistent problems in visual effects. Reports of extreme working hours, unpaid overtime and precarious employment conditions have surfaced repeatedly over the past two decades. These concerns intensified significantly during the COVID crisis when already demanding workloads became even less sustainable.

The coverage data shows two key trends: