Why do we not see much giantess stuff in movies and TV?

So I spent like a fucking hour writing what's basically an essay to post on GiantessCity, and I figured that I might as well post it here too...

I just saw some preview pics for Troll on Netflix, I was reminded about how people on here complaining about the lack of giantess movies. I remember seeing this topic come up a lot here, often with the implication that it's some kind of conspiracy against giantess fans. That seems... unlikely, at least as a primary reason. I had some thoughts on other reasons, that I thought I'd put down here.

First, the technical issues.

A live-action giantess character is a bit of an awkward middle ground in terms of effects.

You could have an actress playing the giantess, shooting on a practical set and against mostly interacting with real miniature models. Full Moon Features has used practical sets for their low-budget giantess movies, and it looked pretty damn good considering what they were working with. Using real miniature sets makes character interaction believable, and makes it look like the actresses are really there on set. On the other hand, it's very hard to get rid of the feeling that it's just a normal woman interacting with miniatures, at least without heavy (and expensive) CGI overlays, and it's probably going to look pretty dated.

You can have a normal woman as the giantess shot against green screen/blue screen. This could work... with a big enough budget. Getting a big budget for a giantess movie is going to be touch, considering they don't exactly have a proven track record, which I'll get to in a bit. Even with a big budget, you'd have the normal issues that come with shooting on a green/blue screen. Sometimes it looks like they're just floating, sometimes the edges of the matte aren't quite right (an especially big issue when characters have long hair!) And even at the best, it's hard to match the lighting with CGI shots, so you tend to end up with scenes where the lighting is very flat and dull. And you have the issues that come with an actor trying to imagine what they're interacting with... there are a lot of potential problems to doing it this way too!

You could do it as a fully CGI character. That would give a lot more freedom, and make it easier to integrate the character with a 3D environment... but a photorealistic, fully CGI giantess is a tricky endeavor. Attractive, young women are just about the hardest type of CGI character to get right (see: She-Hulk.) Things like wrinkles, big pores, and bad complexion are some of the easiest ways to make a CGI character look real, and attractive 20-40-something actresses tend to not really have much in the way of those "flaws." That makes it hard to make the character look fully real, and avoid the uncanny valley.

You could have it be a humanoid alien character, which slightly unreal, inhuman features. Maybe it's a kind of furry character, maybe it's a sexy female Godzilla, maybe it's a Navi. This would go a long way towards getting rid of the uncanny valley issues... but that kind of realistic, fully CGI humanoid is still an expensive thing to do well, and it's going to be hard getting back-rolled by a big studio.

Next, the money.

So why don't producers want to throw a bunch of money at a giantess movie? Well, for one, Hollywood producers have a very cargo cultish mentality about what will and won't do well. For example, producers had a hard time being convinced that Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean wouldn't flop, because sword-and-sandal movies and pirate movies had flopped previously. There's a tendency to assume movie success is based on whether a movie is in a popular genre, ignoring the actual quality and style of the films, and the talent of the people making them. Giantess movies are heavily associated with B-movies, and have a weak track record in the box office. There have already been multiple attempts to do Attack of the 50-foot woman revivals, most of which flopped. As blockbuster budgets have ballooned, studios have gotten more and more small-c conservative with the kinds of projects they're willing to bankroll, and giantess-centric movies haven't succeeded on anything except the smallest budgets.

But there is one hope...

I do think that one potential hope lies in superhero movies. There are a lot of giantess characters in superhero comics, few of which have made the transition to live-action. A lot of them are characters who can go back and forth between being giant and normal-sized, which makes them easier for them to interact with other characters. Additionally, a lot of are either fully encased in high-tech armor when giant, or transform into a giant moster girl, which makes it easier to do them in fully CGI.

James Gunn recently became the lead at DC studios. He has a love for B-movies, and loves to fully embrace the goofier side of superhero comics and characters. He's explored the kinky, peverse side of superheroes in Super. Also, he had a Kaiju villain in The Suicide Squad. There was even a brief, funny (and unfortunately very unattractive) giantess scene in The Suicide Squad... kind of. I can see him pushing for the inclusion of a character like Giganta as a secondary villain, but we'll have to wait and see!

The Boys is another possibility. It already had a very dirty and funny gay sex scene with a shrinking man, and the show hasn't exactly been averse to kinky sex scenes centered on superpowered women either. There was also a brief shot in season one of the size-changing hero jumping into a woman's vagina, if memory serves, although it implied more than it actually showed. I wouldn't put it past them to have a size-changing giantess character, either in the main show or the upcoming college spin-off... But that's going to depend a lot on the potential for comedy, and it's as likely to be anti-fan service as it is fan-service. (I wouldn't be surprised if they introduced a giantess character, only for Butcher or Homelander to make mincemeat of her minutes later.)

But maybe the conspiracy theorists have a point.

As for studios wanting to avoid associations with giantess fans... Yeah, that might not be totally wrong. Overtly sexual characters are becoming a bit more passe in blockbuster movies, or at least certain kinds of overtly sexual characters. It's not even necessarily that they're worried it might be offensive or stereotypical, as it is that it might come off as embarrassing or cringe. And then you have the potential for giantess fans to PM the actress asking her to step on them and shit like that, or getting mad because the movie isn't as sexy as they hoped it would be... All of that's potentially embarrassing for the studio. No one wants to spend $300 million on a fetish movie, especially if it makes most people too embarrassed to watch it in a theater.

But a lower budget giantess movie could work...

I do think a lower budget live-action giantess movie *could* work... with the right creative team. I'm talking about something that's bigger and more impressive than something like Full Moon Studios. I'm not throwing shade on what they've done, their first giantess movie was great considering its budget!

There are a bunch of TV commercials and music videos that have giantess characters walking through cities, and a lot of them look great. With that said, music videos and commercials can have a pretty big budget per-minute... a lot of those videos are pretty limited in terms of how much interaction they actually show. You might have to work around not being able to show much... A lot of the action would probably have to be left to the imagination or hinted at, a la Godzilla 2014. You could intercut shots of a giantess roaming through a city, compositing her onto real-life photos of a city, then switching to practical low-budget miniature effects for some close-ups. It wouldn't be cutting edge, but a creative team that knows how to do things on the cheap and work around limitations could make it work!

Animation might be a better route.

Doing the movie in traditional animation could be better in some ways, but there are drawbacks. Really giant characters are something that can be tricky to well do in 2D animation, which is why shows like Attack on Titan and Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters often end up rendering them in 3D instead. AoT struggled to integrate the 3D giants with 2D animation, but other anime have had better results doing the same thing. Anime like Chainsaw Man show that it can integrate almost flawlessly.

I might be a little biased here, but I think there is more potential for a fully 3D direct to streaming movie. If the entire movie is CGI, it's not a big deal if the giantess isn't fully photorealistic, because everything will be the same style. Love, Death and Robots had some episodes by Blur Studios that were shot in fully CGI, with realistic human characters, which at least mostly avoided the uncanny valley. The tech is getting better, especially with regards to motion capture. Alternatively, you could have a more stylized animation style, and lean into the unreality of it.

Anyway, that's just my own personal thoughts on it, I'm curious what everyone else thinks!