Saturday, December 04, 2004
The Next Runaway Industry
Scott Ross’ company has produced some of the most distinctive visual effects in recent Hollywood history, from the vast inhospitable sea of “Titanic” to the hurtling meteors of “Armageddon” — effects that linger in the memory long after the images of those films’ actors fade.
“So why,” Ross asked me not long ago in his Venice office, “aren’t visual effects companies being paid like movie stars?”
The question wasn’t entirely rhetorical. As chairman and chief executive of Digital Domain, one of the leading visual effects houses in the industry, and as a former executive at Lucasfilm Ltd.’s Industrial Light & Magic, the Bronx-born Ross, 53, has been grappling with the economics of special effects for 20 years.
More precisely, he has been grappling with the irony that as digital effects have grown into a dominant factor in the success of major studio blockbusters, the independent companies that produce those effects have been getting squeezed.
“You’d think we’d be rolling in dough,” he says, “but this is an industry with zero margins.” The result, he warns, is that effects firms looking for ways to save money will start shipping more of their work overseas, following the information technology industry to places like India, China and South Korea.
“What happened to IT will happen to us,” he says.