The news of Marvel Studio's visual effects employees enduring very harsh working conditions for criminally-low pay, and almost never receiving any breaks is a tale as old as last year, however, these new allegations which have come out are just as remorseful.
Alexandra Rebeck - a VFX coordinator for the upcoming second season of Marvel Studio's Loki, has come out speaking to IndieWire (full Interview here) to disclose the harsh treatment her and her team had to endure when working on her first-ever Marvel Studio's project - The Falcon & The Winder Soldier.
“Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” people worked 75 days in a row and only got time off when you “had a mental breakdown.”
“I don’t know how this is acceptable,” she said. “I don’t know how you can work people like this. It was the first-ever Marvel TV show, it was during COVID, there was a lot of things that didn’t work in our favor. … It didn’t stop me from coming back to other Marvel shows, and those were way better. So I don’t think it’s a Marvel thing, but on a show-to-show basis, things can really go horribly wrong. I don’t want anyone who comes into VFX to end up doing what I had to do on that show, because that is not humane. That is not normal.”
Moving forward in the newly-formed International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees - or the IATSE; along with Moving Picture Technicians, and Artists and Allied Craftswill, they will begin to negotiate with Marvel to receive better working contracts for their hard working visual effects employees.
Additionally, Marvel declined to recognize the union prior to this alliance, so they will do everything in their power to win for the sake of their employees, and to highlight the harsh working conditions their industry is exposed to.
Though Marvel Studio's plan on making a change to their release schedule, that will most likely not result in visual effects workers putting in any less work into each project they are hired for.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is an American television miniseries created by Malcolm Spellman for the streaming service Disney+, based on Marvel Comics featuring the characters Sam Wilson / Falcon and Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier. It is the second television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) produced by Marvel Studios, sharing continuity with the films of the franchise, and is set six months after Sam Wilson was handed the mantle of Captain America in the film Avengers: Endgame (2019). Wilson teams up with Bucky Barnes to stop anti-patriots who believe the world was better during the Blip.
Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie reprise their respective roles as Barnes and Wilson from the film series, with Wyatt Russell, Erin Kellyman, Danny Ramirez, Georges St-Pierre, Adepero Oduye, Don Cheadle, Daniel Brühl, Emily VanCamp, Florence Kasumba, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus also starring.