11 Movies Cursed by Bad CGI

Tim Molloy
.January 08, 2025

It's impossible to watch these movies without noticing the bad CGI (computer generated imagery).

The Scorpion King (2002)

The Scorpion King may be the poster child for bad CGI. Arriving in the boom days of terrible, excessive CGI, it's one of many films of the early 2000s that have not aged well. Stills like the one above are a good indication of why.

Shots that could have been practical (meaning, not CGI) were done with pixels for no apparent reason, with often ghastly and comical results.

Does that look like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to you?

Wonder Woman (2017)

This is the first movie that comes to mind when we think of otherwise solid movies marred by bad CGI. It chugs along quite pleasantly until a big anticlimactic fight between Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, above) and a bunch of pixels supposed to represent the evil war god Ares.

Director Patty Jenkins said on Marc Maron's podcast that DC forced her to add the silly CGI for Diana's showdown with Aries.

“Sometimes I’ll read the reviews and… the only thing that we got unanimously some s--- about was the end pyrotechnics," she said. "Like, ‘DC always does this.’ And the truth was, it was them. The studio did make me do that. And it wasn’t right. But that’s okay.”

Justice League (2017)

Some people say you can do anything with CGI. But you can't, apparently, remove Superman's mustache.

As TheWrap hilariously reported in 2017, Warner Bros. called back Superman actor Henry Cavill for reshoots of Justice League, but rival studio Paramount said he couldn't shave the mustache he wore in Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which he was also shooting.

So the Justice League VFX team had to do their best to digitally remove the mustache from shot after shot, running up the film's budget. Look, they did their best.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Don't worry, DC fans, the Marvel movies are going to get mocked here, too.

This Thor sequel is full of some absolutely gorgeous visuals — and also a bizarre scene in which Axl (Kieron L. Dyer, above) delivers an out-of-body via his floating head.

Disney tried to improve the bizarre visual for the film's Disney+ release, but many fans felt that the improvements... weren't improvements.

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

Almost all of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania takes place in the Quantum Realm, and that's a big problem when the Quantum Realm looks so weightless, artificial and randomly conceived.

After the film's release, some people who worked on the film griped to Vulture about feeling rushed on the project.

It's a good reminder of the fact that bad CGI often isn't the fault of the artists doing the bad CGI, but rather higher-ups who don't give them enough time to do good CGI.

Green Lantern (2011)

We'll let the image above speak for itself.

The Irishman (2019)

Sometimes the decades of de-aging for Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci in The Irishman look amazing. Sometimes not. A RobertEbert.com critic wrote of the shot above, in which 70-something De Niro is supposed to be in his mid-thirties:

"The CGI is good, but something’s still off. De Niro’s face looks waxen, corpselike — even though the skin seems warm, taut, smooth. We see the features of youth, yet still some senescence shows through. It’s like bad Botox."

Such sequences felt especially frustrating when people starting using deepfake technology to do over Irishman scenes on the cheap — and they sometimes looked better than the ones in the movie.

Anyway, we still love The Irishman.

Gemini Man (2019)

Gemini Man, in which Will Smith plays a hitman battling a younger version of himself, has lots of great CGI — but also some very bad CGI, like the moment above.

We know everyone involved in the film knows what young Will Smith looks like — The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is widely available in syndication. But they just slipped up here and there.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Part of the charm of the Indiana Jones movies is their practical effects, like the melting Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the burning stones at the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. How did they do that?

Many critics have painstakingly listed the flaws of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, but one of the film's silliest moments comes when Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) goes swinging through a jungle with monkeys. The terrible shot above is the best one we could find.

LaBeouf was unfortunate enough to rise to fame at the precise moment that excessive and often bad CGI was coming into fashion, notably in the Transformers franchise.

Cats (2019)

Cats had a top-tier cast including Judy Dench, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift, and there was nothing wrong with the story or music — its based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that is one of the most successful movies in Broadway history.

So why was it such a massive bomb? I guess we'll never know.

Suffice it to say, the Cats fiasco is one era Swift (above, kind of) would probably like to forget.

Black Widow (2020)

Ridiculous green-screen sequences bedeviled Black Widow, released in theaters and on-demand at the height of Covid lockdowns, so viewers at home could pause, rewind and scrutinize the bad CGI.

A sequence above, in which Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) pleads with her sister not to make some ludicrous sacrifice, became a meme due to its all-around unconvincingness.