When TRON was released in July of 1982 it was considered groundbreaking in its use of computer generated imagery (CGI). In his original review of TRON in the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert (1982) called it “…a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous.” He also added that, “In an age of amazing special effects, TRON is a state-of-the-art movie.” By comparing the way that CGI is used in a movie to its rank based on total gross sales it will show that CGI movies have steadily become more popular and dominate in gross sales since TRON was released.
TRON was created by Steven Lisberger in 1976 when he came up with the idea for ...view middle of the document...
There are over 15 minutes of film that are 100% CGI.
It was disqualified for the 1982 Academy Award for Visual Effects because it was considered cheating to have used CGI in such an extensive way. It wasn’t until 1989 when The Abyss was awarded the Oscar for Visual Effects did a movie with extensive CGI use win. Now it is commonplace.
As the acceptance of computer generated movies along with the technology started to grow movies containing large amounts of CGI started to gain wider acceptance. This can be shown by looking at what rank a movie is based on the total gross per year. TRON was listed at number 22 in 1982. That same year E.T. was number one and it had minimal work. The Abyss only managed to be 24th in 1989 and it won the Oscar. Not until Jurassic Park in 1993 was there a movie that used massive amounts of CGI and was number one in gross sales, which also happened to win the Visual Effects Oscar. Since then there have been very few exceptions to the number one movie not containing a lot of CGI, or in the case of Toy Story in 1995 being 100% CGI.
As movie making continues to progress and the line between...