What if CGI had replaced most big name actors?

The technology is coming, right now it is cheaper and better to hire top-class actors, put up sets, stuntmen, pay for costumes, make-up etc. then the CGI. When there are some special effects often the movie today will use a lot of CGI because either they cannot do it or its cheaper. Sometimes in individual cases, eg when an actor dies in real life they need to use CGI to replace him. It may allow soon cheap actors to replace top-class actors even dead one, eg Humphrey Bogart. The technology is slowly improving, getting more competitive and we are seeing more and more CGI being used.

What if the technology of CGI had improved much faster and actors were far less in demand today.

I would say that movies be much cheaper to make, actors would not be so politically powerful and the movie film companies more powerful.

What do you think?
 
then voice actors would be in demand

This.

But I would imagine we’d see a pretty tough transition phase where actors convert themselves into voice actors to get employment and then have to compete with actual voice actors to get their opportunities.
 
I think that audiences are still going to want to know that when they watch a movie, they're actually seeing some beloved, big-name actor playing the role, not a CGI simulacrum. There are a zillion voice-actors who could've done a great job of playing Woody in Toy Story, but people still get a thrill from thinking "Yes, yes, that's Tom Hanks I'm hearing up there!"
 
Without some kind of magic wand you really can’t improve it much faster without PODs like Difference Engine way back. It’s dependent on processing power and cost of hardware both of which are directly tied to fab tech. In addition to hundreds of billions IBM and Motorola and various others spent across half a century, Intel joined in with thirty years of never worrying about the cost of anything courtesy of Microsoft and IBM, all of this pushing fab advances as hard as possible. Not to mention the unlimited World War 2 / Cold War defence dollars that created and empowered Silicon Valley in the first place.

Likewise on the software side Industrial Light & Magic used their own eventually massive budgets to push as hard as possible in their own virtuous cycle. By the 1990s major competition rises up with Pixar and Cameron’s Lightstorm which along with computer and nonlinear editing plus cheap Amiga’s & expensive Sun/SGI systems propel things forward.

Literally trillions of dollars and uncountable people and hours worked across eighty years and even today only a handful of teams can create virtually seamless CGI given massive hundred million dollar plus budgets and time. Virtual actors have certainly improved from Matrix Reloaded say, but they’re not flawless yet.

So you see why I’m talking about way back PODs. Because aside from earlier computers there’s not much you can do—limited by fabs means even if you manage say a microprocessor a few years earlier or speed up CPU development in a non x86 dominated timeline isn’t going to deliver vastly more.

Edit: even if we jump to the ASB solution, what time are we talking about? Like are they perfect in 1990? Do the studios try and keep under wraps which scenes are real actors and which aren’t? Do they just use it to bring back an all-star line-up from the past?
 
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Lets not forget that CGI stuff is hugely expensive and takes a LOT of time to do especially if you're going for really realistic stuff.

For example the Orcs in the Warcraft movie were a mix of motion capture and CGi and they looked amazing, they were also very very expensive to make and animate.

and if you just went full CGI for a movie even a cutscene like this.


takes an inordinate amount of time to make.

Whilst computers are getting more powerful now, I doubt you'd see much earlier an introduction than what's being attempted now due to the sheer processing power needed.
 
Are people familiar with the Bollywood dubbing phenomenon? You've got your movie stars, right, your Shahrukh Khans and whatnot. And then, pretty much invariably, you've got a dubbing artist to do their singing. Since the musical numbers are such an integral part of Bollywood, these dubbers can become huge names in their own right.

Just gives a model for a world where there are celebrity opportunities for movies for those who are only heard. I can imagine a situation where the most graceful or evocative motion-capture artists- Jones, Sirkis- and whoever provides the voices, share the bill almost equally.

Of course we also have a situation like Cumberbatch's Smaug, where a guy hired for his voice also ends up REALLY getting into the motion-capture stuff. So a complete bifurcation is probably not going to happen.
 
There was a sci fi short story back in the 1960s along this line. Robots replace actors instead of CGI. The protagonist, a former star, is reduced to sweeping the theatre floors. At least until the cheapskate manager finally buys a industrial grade Rhoomba to clean.

I expect there would be a few holdouts like Taratino, producing live effects/stunts the old school way, & doing good at it.
 
Of course we also have a situation like Cumberbatch's Smaug, where a guy hired for his voice also ends up REALLY getting into the motion-capture stuff. So a complete bifurcation is probably not going to happen.
motion-capture isn't even required for that kind of thing--a relatively common story about Batman: The Animated Series is that Mark Hamill would get really...well, animated while voicing the Joker, really and truly getting into the role even though he'd never be seen on-screen. it's one of the reasons that Hamill is THE definitive Joker for millions of people and why he went back to reprise the role so many times and even came out of retirement as that character to do it one more time with Arkham Knight.
 
There was a sci fi short story back in the 1960s along this line. Robots replace actors instead of CGI. The protagonist, a former star, is reduced to sweeping the theatre floors. At least until the cheapskate manager finally buys a industrial grade Rhoomba to clean.

I expect there would be a few holdouts like Taratino, producing live effects/stunts the old school way, & doing good at it.

I mean there are still plays, somehow. And if you think about it in terms of audience size for even the most successful Broadway show vs like the median Hollywood movie in a given year, the amount of attention the plays get is really astounding.

The power of finite resources in a capitalist economy with no upper bound for luxury, eh?
 
I mean there are still plays, somehow. And if you think about it in terms of audience size for even the most successful Broadway show vs like the median Hollywood movie in a given year, the amount of attention the plays get is really astounding.
there's always something to be said for seeing something in real-life, even if it's essentially staged. it's the reason people sound really jaded or whatnot if they answer the question "Hey, do you want to come watch the sunset with me?" with "Just sends me the pics."
 
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The power of finite resources in a capitalist economy with no upper bound for luxury, eh?

Of course.

One of the points Taratino was making when he did Death Proof with old school stunt techniques vs computer graphs was that he created a entire nail biter for pennies compared to the typical computer enhanced work. Good writing, acting, and scene layout made up for the lack of slick graphics.
 
What if the technology of CGI had improved much faster and actors were far less in demand today. I would say that movies be much cheaper to make, actors would not be so politically powerful and the movie film companies more powerful. What do you think?

Are actors politically powerful? I've always assumed that their power is an illusion - in reality even the greatest stars have to audition, and from the point of view of the producers the actors are just hired hands. The recent scandal involving Harvey Weinstein suggests that at least from his point of view actresses were interchangeable.

I mean, people idolise certain actors, but behind the scenes they're employees, and only a handful have ever been in a position of real genuine power. Kevin Costner briefly had it after Dances With Wolves, for example, and Clint Eastwood has it, and Vin Diesel has at some points had power, but the majority of stars have to take what work they can get.

On a tangent I've always wondered what happens to the digital models of film stars. Somewhere on a hard drive there's a detailed digital model of Angelina Jolie, created for Beowulf, and I imagine that some people would pay good money to have a copy. Jolie presumably has the rights to demand that her likeness isn't used without her say-so, but digital piracy is incredibly common.

As for the OP the result would presumably lead to a boom in animation, with Hollywood resembling the Japanese anime industry in that respect; no-one would have the same star power as legends of the screen such as Steve Guttenberg or Judge Reinhold, what little cultural cachet exists would be shared between the writers and graphic designers.
 
Just give Disney a few more years. They've already used simple versions on movies as early as Tron Legacy, and more complex ones on Rogue One and Captian America: Civil War.
 
Think back 200 years. All there was then were live plays. Actors were not lionized. Or paid millions. In fact there were regarded as not much better than tramps. I think we may be heading back into a similar situation. Movie studios will copyright their popular CGI characters. But live actors will lose value. Technology giveth and technology taketh away.
 
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