Much has been made of Marvel Studios' relationship with the VFX houses that they work with, and with She-Hulk: Attorney at Law being such a CG-heavy series, you just know a lot of artists were put under serious pressure.
They certainly managed to make the title hero look better than she did in that first teaser, anyway, and Head Writer Jessica Gao has now shed some light on that process. For starters, she admits to not being heavily involved in She-Hulk's creation, simply because that's not how Marvel Studios works!
"Marvel is this kind of machine. VFX is one of those things where they already have their way of doing things," the writer tells Variety. "The machine just gets rolling. You can try to insert yourself as much as you can, but at a certain point, you’re forced to get out of the way."
"I just knew CG was expensive. From the beginning, I asked Kevin [Feige], 'How much can we do? How cost-conscious should I be? Give me some guidelines.' And he said, 'If I’m gonna watch a show called She-Hulk, I want to see She-Hulk.' That kind of was the carte blanche to just write it however I wanted. And I remember distinctly thinking, 'I hope we remember this conversation and the budgets come back and somebody gets mad at me for it.'"
As it happens, they did circle back to that conversation...the tone, however, had changed.
"Once we got into pre-production and production itself, once somebody had to sit down and start figuring out the cost of everything, it was like every week, I was told, 'Can you cut more She-Hulk scenes? Can you change more She-Hulk scenes to Jen? Can she be Jen in more scenes?' There were a lot of things that then had to be changed at the last minute to go from She-Hulk to Jen. Even in post, you know, we had to cut a lot of shots by virtue just because it was She-Hulk."
It's interesting to get some insights into Marvel Studios' process, especially with all that talk about issues with VFX at the moment. Having to cut scenes with She-Hulk was likely an inevitability on a television budget, though it does sound like a rather chaotic process for those working on the show.
Before you start to panic, though, we've seen the first four episodes of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and it definitely feels like there's more than enough of the Jade Giantess in the series!
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law's first episode premieres on Disney+ on August 18.