That jaw-dropping moment in ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ of Tom Cruise trapped in a steel pod, watching nuclear missiles arc across the sky and cities vanish in fiery blasts was pieced together in a modest apartment in Bengaluru’s Whitefield.

“I was in my shorts, sipping chai, compositing the missile launches, the explosions and the whole sequence that was CGI,” says Mayank Tiwari, a mining-engineer-turned-VFX-compositor from Ranchi, laughing at the absurdity of working on the shot from his swivel chair.

Over the years, he’s cut out shoot plates for Hollywood films like ‘Cats & Dogs’, ‘Green Hornet’, ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, and ‘Clash of the Titans’, cleaned up skylines for ‘Tron: Legacy’, simulated a tsunami in ‘Hereafter’, and built royal banquets for ‘The Gilded Age’.

That, in a sense, is the story of India’s quiet, unseen rise as Hollywood’s visual-effects backroom, all bringing cinema’s grand illusions to life.

Today, Gaurav Choudhury in Patna who leads a 100-member team at Rotomaker, a self-described ‘offshore VFX partner’ for global studios, shows just how far this largely invisible workforce has spread. With branches in Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Vijayawada, the studio brings high-end work closer to the small towns its artists come from.

“A lot of us are from Bihar, UP, and Bengal,” says Choudhury, who works on wire removal, cleanup, and frame restoration. “It lets me stay close to home and still earn almost twice what I would on an Indian project. We don’t always know which client we’re working for, but there’s a steady flow of international commercials and web series.”

Ganesh Papanna, vice-president of ABAI, a Karnataka-based non-profit for India’s animation, visual effects, gaming and comics (AVGC) industry, says Indian studios manage the nuts and bolts of high-volume, lower-cost work — while the creative design stays with Hollywood. The VFX supply chain runs like a global relay where a single shot can pass through half a dozen hands across three time zones.

Hollywood studios such as Disney or Paramount hire top vendors in the US or UK like ILM, MPC, Framestore who then send large portions of work to Indian production houses like Prime Focus, DNEG, or Prasad EFX. These major studios break down sequences into smaller tasks and pass them to mid-sized boutique studios that specialize in one or two skills. Those boutiques, in turn, rope in freelancers finishing individual shots from home.

That future, however, holds new uncertainties. There’s the spectre of Donald Trump’s proposed 100% tariff on foreign-made films. “I think the 100% tariff is on films entering America,” clarifies Papanna. But he’s confident that the industry can survive this.

“For work done outside the US, the surcharge is 25%. Even then, it’s cheaper to do it here.” The likely fallout, he says, will be leaner vendor rates. “A producer might say, ‘I can’t spend Rs 100, do it for Rs 70’ but somebody will take it.”

The math makes it obvious why India is the execution hub. “An average roto artist in India might earn around Rs 20,000-Rs 40,000 a month — roughly $3,000-$6,000 a year — for work that would cost $40,000-60,000 annually in the US.”

It’s this enormous cost gap, says Papanna, that keeps the world’s most spectacular explosions, creatures, and galaxies routed through Indian hands.

“If Hollywood is the interior designer, think of Indian VFX firms as painters and carpenters,” says Parthasarathy Iyer, who runs Andheri-based studio Katalyst Creates.

“I have about 25 artists when work comes in,” says Iyer. “They can be anywhere in Patna, Goa, or Mumbai. All they need is decent internet.”

Abhishek Prasad, director and chief technology officer of Prasad Studios including Prasad EFX, has been part of the invisible engine behind Hollywood spectacles like ‘Ben-Hur’, ‘Hercules’, ‘Hugo’ and ‘Maleficent’.

“We do a lot of detail-heavy work that may not carry our name in the end credits (due to non-disclosure agreements) but is essential for every frame to hold together,” he says. Studios, he adds, “know we understand workflows, quality check, and the discipline required.”

Scalability is key too. “We can ramp up hardware, software, and people in a month. That kind of agility isn’t easy elsewhere.”

Hollywood’s biggest VFX vendors set up shop in India in the mid-2010s. Technicolor — the French company behind the visual effects of countless Hollywood blockbusters — led the charge. Within months, they had snapped up nearly every skilled artist in the country.

“It was a gold rush,” recalls Tiwari, who rode that wave. “At first, they gave India the easy shots, but once we kept delivering smarter fixes, the trust grew. And if you were earning Rs 60,000 a month for Indian projects, you could suddenly make Rs 3-4 lakh doing the same job for a Hollywood project.”

For American studios, even that was roughly half of what they’d have paid a mid-level artist in the US. Then the bubble burst. In Feb 2025, Technicolor’s global operations went bankrupt, a casualty of the prolonged 2023 Hollywood strikes. “Overnight, over 3,000 artists in India lost jobs,” says Tiwari. But that’s also when the remote-freelance economy exploded.

Studios set up small India outposts or paid through partners. “Old colleagues from Los Angeles would message asking if I was free, had a software licence and we’d put together a team overnight. And it paid far better. What I made in a month as salary, I could now make in ten days,” says Tiwari. Day rates run anywhere from Rs 3,000 to Rs 30,000, depending on skill.

India’s main VFX hubs remain Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Chennai, but mid-sized studios and freelancers can be based anywhere. “Freelancing has become very, very big,” says Papanna. "People work in a company by day and freelance at night. I’d say 35% of artists are freelance now.”

So, if tariffs aren’t the real threat, what is? “AI hasn’t fully entered VFX yet, but when it does, jobs will go,” says Iyer, who’s already adapting. “I don’t do heavy VFX now but focus on motion graphics and title montages, which I can now do myself on AI tools like Midjourney instead of hiring an artist.”

Tiwari says AI is already replacing some basic, labour-intensive tasks and cutting timelines. “But you still need a compositor’s eye so it’s not replacing my creative skills but helping me work faster.”

Prasad calls this the next upskilling wave. “Those who learn will survive,” he says. His bigger concern is elsewhere. “If international work slows, training and R&D investment could take a hit. You can lose a generation of skilled artists if opportunity dries up.”

Another reason for optimism is that Indian content is growing fast, says Prasad. “Budgets are better and the quality bar has gone up.” Iyer agrees that domestic boom — especially OTT series and CGI-heavy regional films — will keep smaller studios afloat even if Hollywood contracts shrink. “Ten years ago, there were hardly any Gujarati, Marathi, or Odia films. Now there’s one every week.”

Papanna too is upbeat. “After all, VFX in India isn’t just about Hollywood anymore,” he says. “Films like 'RRR’, ‘Brahmastra’, ‘Kalki 2898 AD’ show what’s possible here.”