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With a record-shattering $2.8 billion at the box office, Avengers: Endgame is simply one of the biggest movies of all time. It will probably take movie historians a few years to figure out just why Avengers: Endgame and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been so consistently successful.

One of the many reasons why the MCU movies have been so successful may be because of how cool and awesome every character and fight scene looks like. Not all fight scenes in the MCU look cool, but most do, thanks to the magic of CGI. That said, without CGI, everything in the MCU looks different, and Marvel fans can’t help but laugh.

What the creatures of the MCU look like

Kevin Feige speaks onstage
Kevin Feige | Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Disney

There are many creatures and animals in the MCU, but obviously, Bradley Cooper’s Rocket Raccoon is not played by a real raccoon. That said, as a CGI-free fan poster on Reddit showed, in the movies, Rocket Raccoon, before the CGI artists do their magic, is played by a guy in a green suit holding up a ridiculous looking raccoon puppet. This puppet looks so silly that one fan said that it looked “cursed.” 

Valkyrie, played by Tessa Thompson, rides into battle with a very cool looking Pegasus. Pegasuses don’t exist in real life, so, for the movie, they just put her on a machine and had two crew members, also wearing a green suit, rocking her back and forth so that it looks like she’s flying.

What the Hulk and Thanos look like

In the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, the two most jacked dudes in the universe, the Hulk and Thanos, have a bare-knuckled brawl. While this was a cool looking fight scene, both characters were, of course, almost entirely CGI. The only part of their body that even resembles their actor is their face. 

As that CGI-free fan poster showed, when Mark Ruffalo is playing the Hulk, he just shows up on set in a motion-capture suit. It’s just a black spandex suit with a lot of bells and whistles for the CGI artists to use. Josh Brolin’s Thanos is even funnier looking. Brolin also wears a motion-capture suit, but, unlike Ruffalo, he also has to wear a massive torso that’s supposed to show how wide Thanos is as a character. 

However, for some reason, Marvel and its CGI artists apparently don’t need a pair of massive, Thanos-sized legs for Brolin to wear. So, he looks really funny since, above his waist, he has this oversized costume on, while below the waist, it’s just his regular human-sized legs.

As one fan said, “It’s a testament to Brolin’s acting that he got such a serious complex performance out of that goofy looking thing.”

Another fan just replied, “He skipped leg day.”

Some characters look fine without CGI, though

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While CGI is extremely important to the MCU, Marvel has also made attempts to do things with practical effects. As a result, many of the characters don’t look that different without CGI.

For example, Chris Evans’ Captain America and Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man look mostly the same without CGI. Of course, even though Iron Man’s armor needs a lot of CGI, Downey is still wearing a practical costume a lot of the time.

That said, while many of the human characters looked fine, Marvel fans did have a debate over Karen Gillan’s Nebula. 

The CGI-free fan poster showed her looking like she does in real life, but, in reality, her whole look was mostly practical. In fact, when she first got the role, she actually shaved her head for it. That said, in Avengers: Endgame, Marvel just made her look bald and then painted her face. So, without CGI, Nebula would look about the same as she does in the movies.

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