The technique has improved and the conditions have degraded. Effects houses now deliver far more shots per film on shorter schedules while the edit is still changing, which removes the iteration that makes a shot convincing. Older films also used fewer effects shots and hid them behind practical elements and darkness.
Volume and schedule, not skill
A blockbuster from the late nineteen-nineties might contain a few hundred effects shots. A comparable film now can contain several thousand, delivered by multiple vendors, often with the edit still in flux and a release date that cannot move.
Convincing effects work comes from iteration: a shot gets reviewed, adjusted and re-rendered many times. When the schedule compresses and the shot count multiplies, iterations per shot fall. That is the mechanism behind most of what audiences describe as bad CGI, and it is a production-management outcome rather than a technical one.
Older films hid their work
The effects that hold up best were designed around their limitations. Practical elements did the heavy lifting, digital work was used sparingly to extend or clean up, and shots were staged in darkness, rain, or motion where the eye has less to check against.
Jurassic Park is the standard example: roughly a few minutes of digital dinosaurs, mostly at night or in rain, cut against animatronics. The comparison people make is therefore not like for like. They are comparing a handful of protected shots against thousands of exposed ones.
Survivorship does the rest
The bad effects of previous decades are not in circulation. Nobody rewatches the films where the compositing failed, so the memory of older effects work is filtered to the successes, while current effects are judged across everything currently released.
That does not make the complaint baseless. Specific recent films genuinely look unfinished, and the reasons are usually documented: a reshoot late in the schedule, a vendor change, a release date held while the edit moved. The problem is real and its cause is upstream of the artists.
Recommended viewing
Sources and further reading
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FAQs about Why Do People Say CGI Looks Worse Now?
Has the technology actually got worse?
No, and by any measure it is far more capable than a decade ago. What has changed is shot count per film, schedule length and how late the edit keeps moving. Effects quality is largely a function of iterations per shot, and that number has fallen even as capability has risen.
Why does Jurassic Park still look good?
Because it contains very little digital work and hides what it has. A few minutes of digital dinosaurs, mostly staged at night or in rain, cut against full-scale animatronics. Comparing it to a modern film with thousands of exposed daylight effects shots is not a like-for-like test.
Are practical effects always better?
Not inherently, and the best results are almost always hybrids. Practical elements give the digital work something real to sit against, and digital work removes the constraints that used to limit what could be staged at all. Films that commit entirely to either approach tend to date faster.