Even if you have never heard of Blur Studio, you’ve definitely seen its work.
The Culver City, Calif.-based animation and visual effects studio does it all — the production of the wildly successful “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies and the Emmy-nominated animated anthology series “Love, Death & Robots” (on Netflix) and “Secret Level” (on Prime Video); video game cut scenes for AAA titles like “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare;” the jaw-dropping opening credits for David Fincher’s “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo:” and even the animation for Universal Studios’ The Simpsons Ride. Its 2004 animated short film “Gopher Broke,” directed by Jeff Fowler (who would go on to direct the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies), was nominated for an Oscar. Tim Miller, the company’s co-founder and owner, directed the first “Deadpool” movie and 2019’s “Terminator: Dark Fate.”
But perhaps more impressive than the output is its financial performance.
Blur Studio is profitable and has never been in debt or had outside financing or loans against the company. It was founded in 1995 and has roughly 100 employees. In an interview with TheWrap, Miller described Blur as “a company built by artists, for artists, to create content that I feel like otherwise wouldn’t make it to screens, big and small.”
Nan Morales, Blur’s president, added, “I also think we spent the last few years recruiting the best teams globally and we’re building the community for the visual work and storytelling.”
Its success stands in stark contrast with most visual effects houses that have trouble remaining afloat. The challenges emerge from productions awarding jobs to the lowest-bidder, creating an untenable situation when projects stretch over months and filmmakers demand countless VFX iterations — the impact being massive blockbusters with poor CGI scenes and a rising number of visual effects houses closing.
So how did Blur avoid this fate?
“I would love to say that it’s all due to precise planning and pinpoint accuracy and focus. But a lot of it is luck,” Miller said. “We got into the games industry, which to some degree has been protected by tax incentives, and it’s an industry that we love, which is the luckiest thing. We get to work with these great partners on this cutting edge technology, on the kind of subject matter that, honestly, I always wanted to work on.”
The tax incentives that protected video game production allowed Blur to stay in Los Angeles at a time when studios were fleeing to Vancouver or London. Although the video game industry isn’t immune to periods of decline, as sweeping layoffs have hit major game companies over the last few years. Which makes Blur’s diversification all the more important.
Miller said that most of Blur’s output is “work for hire.” There are plenty of projects that Blur is developing in-house but they function primarily as a studio who is hired by outside companies – video game publishers and streaming studios – to create content for them. Blur then partners with other studios to make sure that all the work gets done. This approach also adds visual variety to projects, like the different art styles and aesthetics that populate both “Love, Death & Robots” (developed in-house by Blur and streaming on Netflix) and “Secret Level” (a project that originated with Sony’s video game division and streams on Prime Video).
“When I started the studio, it was because I thought nobody would let me direct an animated film unless I actually owned a studio that could do it, which was my reason for building it,” Miller said.
But he’s also thankful he has “Love, Death & Robots,” an R-rated animated anthology series full of sex and violence that Blur produces and which allows him to “hire our competitors in the game cinematic space.” “They’re all people that normally are competing for jobs against us, which is great because it’s this really tight community of really driven boutique studios where I think the best artists are. On ‘Love, Death & Robots,’ we’ll do two or three episodes every season. And for now, for ‘Secret Level,’ we’ll do two or three episodes ourselves, and then we spread the love around.”
Keeping things small
When Miller started Blur in the 1995, the same year that Pixar released the first feature-length computer animated film “Toy Story,” he wanted to be “the dark Pixar and build this big company.” Los Angeles was the epicenter for the emerging computer animation movement.
Now? “That’s not so much my goal,” Miller said.
“It’s not sustainable,” Morales said of making that dream a reality. “We’re not seeing a business practice that that’s a sustainable market. We’re a small, boutique shop. We’re like 100 employees. People think we’re huge. We’re not. That’s why we have to have our vendor partners and seek out the best people that are out there.”
Blur is an animation studio that develops projects and animates parts of those projects but also partners with other studios to complete the work. Blur might animate an entire opening title sequence or video game cinematic, but on larger, more complex projects like “Love, Death & Robots,” they’ll work with other studios to bring most of the segments to life. And on even the biggest projects, like the “Sonic the Hedgehog” movies (and the Paramount+ spinoff series “Knuckles”), studios like MPC and Industrial Light & Magic also worked on the effects and animation.
It used to be that animation studios would do all the work for a single project, but it’s becoming more commonplace for a studio to work on most of the animation while also farming out different sections. DreamWorks Animation’s recent “The Bad Guys 2,” for example, had some key sequences handled by Sony Pictures Imageworks. Blur was quietly ahead of the curve.
The work is having an impact on the industry. Morales talked about a small studio Blur worked with that was flying under the radar but was able to hire 150 people for a big job because of its work on “Secret Level.”
“These boutique shops are doing quite well from ‘Secret Level’ and ‘Love Death & Robots,’ in the sense that their work is being shown globally,” Morales said.
She added that this work keeps other studios from faltering. “2024 was awful,” Morales said. “I came into a huge dip in the economy for trailers and cinematics and even content. It just died out. In 2025, we did okay, and hopefully we keep going forward, it’s a struggle for everyone out there. And I’m really happy the way we have built a community of sharing, trying to help everyone stay afloat. It’s not the big companies, it’s the small companies that have to stand around, to make it competitive out there.”
But while keeping Blur small makes the economics of the company work in its favor, Miller also has a creative reason for doing so.
“My reason for the size of the company, is I realized I’m selfish, and running a big company doesn’t excite me as much as doing the work,” Miller said. “The only reason to be that big would be to get rich. And that doesn’t interest me nearly as much as making stuff.”
Miller said that the model that they’ve worked out, where they collaborate with their partners and friends, is ideal. That way, when they come off of a show, they aren’t forced with cutting payroll or hours or employees just to stay afloat.
“I’m working on a new idea to split the difference between a loose alliance of sorts that might help all the problems that these smaller studios face,” Miller teased. “But do I think about being a big behemoth? Those days might be over.”
Embracing AI
A major disrupter is entering the industry in the form of AI, with its magical promises of being able to produce entire animated films and cut the need for human creatives significantly (which so far, haven’t been fulfilled). But the process has an uncanny ability to mimic actual art, as was seen by the wave of Hayao Miyazaki rip-offs that flooded social media earlier this year.
In June, Miller was on a panel at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival where other speakers were “dancing around the issue.” He dove right in.
“I was like, ‘Why are you guys talking like this thing may go away or it may not be a factor or if we close our eyes, it might not exist? It’s not going to happen.’”
In the past, any new technology or tool that would come along, Miller and other creatives in the field would jump on it, “because it would increase my creative abilities.”
Not when it comes to AI.
“I’ve seen a real resistance to the AI tools, and I get it, it feels like an existential threat to their jobs, and by extension, their families and their lives. I think that’s a very justified and real concern for the industry. I understand the terror, but it means that people stay away from it, and they cover their eyes and pretend it doesn’t happen,” Miller said, noting he would rather be in control of the technology than leave it to a large corporation.
Miller and Blur had developed an adaptation of English author China Miéville’s 2000 novel “Perdido Street Station” at Amazon, which is no longer moving forward. The project was, in Miller’s estimation “incredibly complicated – lots of characters and creatures and everything.” The property was decidedly “not for kids” and would have been “prohibitively expensive to make with the traditional tools.”
“But AI gives us a chance at using the efficiencies that it could bring to all parts of the pipeline to tell a story at a cost that it can afford to not be for 11-year-olds,” Miller said. “That kind of s–t gives me hope. It shouldn’t cost $200 million to make a movie.”
“It’s innovation of tools,” Morales said of AI. “It’s not replacing the artist … As a tool base to allow us some more latitude and be able to create environments that aren’t key elements to a storytelling, I think people will accept that, and it will help us bring more stories to the public.”
Not that she’s totally sold. She recently saw some AI-generated “content” (her word) and she found it wanting. “It’s not very visually pleasing,” Morales said.
Miller was reluctant to get in a debate about what AI can or can’t do, because it might be able to do something that we don’t even know about yet.
Still, it’s enough for Miller to quote Arthur C. Clarke – “the future is not only stranger than you imagine, it’s stranger than you can imagine.”
“I feel a bit of that right now,” Miller admitted. “I personally believe that for the next 12 months, our plan is to not replace our pipeline. It’s about what parts of the process can we make better and more efficient. On the production side, being able to look at the data of how we do things and how long it takes and where we put our focus is as important as the actual pixel manipulation.”
What’s next for Blur
One thing that has remained slightly out of reach for Miller and the team at Blur has been the production of an animated feature. Morales said that the company can “definitely do” an animated feature and Miller said, “We have to work with our partners.”
He said that “The Goon” — a graphic novel adaptation that Blur Studio and David Fincher have been trying to get off the ground since 2008 — had recently been set up at Netflix. It took a year to put the deal together. And a month after they signed the agreement, Netflix told them, “We’re not going to do adult animated features anymore.” “I’m like, Oh my God, f–king kill me,” Miller said.
It just made him more determined to make it himself.
Miller said that he’s sympathetic to what happens to these movies at studios, but Blur is always seemingly caught in those corporate crosshairs. “We’ve got so much cool stuff developed and then somebody leaves and the new person doesn’t like it or somebody doesn’t have the power to push it through,” he said.
“Love, Death & Robots,” for instance, initially started life as a reboot of the animated anthology film “Heavy Metal,” based on the American comic book magazine known for its bleak, but visually lush, sci-fi, fantasy and horror elements. Miller had some amazing directors lined up to direct individual segments, including Fincher, Gore Verbinski, Zack Snyder, Guillermo del Toro and James Cameron. But after more than a decade, he pivoted and turned it into a television series, which has now had 45 episodes and received multiple Emmy wins, and remains one of the most exciting animated series currently streaming.
Morales said that when she came to Blur, “I could see the future and the animation space filling in the live-action, tentpole movie space, when studios are looking at $200 million+ and I know in animation we could do that for a lot less and give them the same quality.”
She points to the “Warhammer” episode of “Secret Level,” which is just as tense and thrilling as any live-action feature, rendered gorgeously (and in a video game engine, no less) for a fraction of the cost of, say, the latest Marvel Studios movie.
“When I walked in the first day and talked to Tim and saw ‘Warhammer,’ I said, ‘That’s the future. That’s the future of big movies,” Morales said. “We have to embrace that and show that skill.’ And I think Blur can lead that charge for a lot of people. We’re seeing the ability to do it right now. It’s just actually putting it out there.”
Using a video game engine to make an entire animated feature, or even part of an animated feature, would be a breakthrough, but the world of visual effects has been embracing the technology over the past few years.
The most notable example of this is The Volume, the virtual stage system that Industrial Light & Magic developed and first employed on Lucasfilm’s Disney+ streaming series “The Mandalorian.” The technology, dubbed StageCraft, utilizes real-time computing and video game engines to create animated backdrops and star-fields live on set, instead of using a blue or green screen and filling it in later. And it’s being employed on movies that don’t take place in a galaxy far, far away, most recently on the Colin Farrell/Margot Robbie romantic fantasy “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” which debuted last month.
Maybe the biggest challenge Miller faces, he said, is the “big group of people who just don’t like animation.”
“They’re not going to come inside the tent. But if we can get across the uncanny valley, and I do think we’re almost there, then that opens up a whole different world of stories for animation,” Miller said. “It opens up a whole different demo of people who will watch the content because it looks like live action, or close enough to live action that it’ll get us across. I mean, video games did a lot to bring people into the adult animation tent.”
About 15 years ago, a trailer surfaced for an adaptation of Eric Powell’s beloved comic book series “The Goon.” The brief clip, directed by Miller, was visually inventive and a loving reinvention of the source material. An eventual movie, produced by Fincher, was proposed, with a Kickstarter campaign launched to cover necessary pre-production costs. But the latest setback at Netflix hasn’t deterred Miller.
Maybe, with the right tools, he says, it can finally see the light of day instead of remaining on Blur’s perpetual to-do list.
“I don’t give up,” Miller said. “I never give up.” And you tend to believe him.
