This story can also be told with Peter Jackson as a movie director who just got lucky. He wrote three books that people really liked, won some awards, and then he moved on. But that version doesn’t show that he spent decades making tools that no one else had. These tools were so advanced and important to how movies look today that an American tech company paid $1.6 billion to own them. That’s the story that should be told.
When Unity Technologies said it would buy Weta Digital’s technology division for US$1.625 billion, many people who aren’t in the film or game industries had to stop and think about what they just bought. To my surprise, the answer is both easy and shocking. They bought the secret software that was used in some of the most famous visual effects in movie history. This includes the motion-capture work that gave Gollum his hollow eyes, the simulation systems that made Avatar’s Na’vi feel like they had weight and breath, and the tools that gave Caesar’s wrinkled brow in Planet of the Apes an unsettlingly real look.
Jackson helped to start Weta Digital in 1993, more out of necessity than business sense. Because he couldn’t find the tools he needed to make his ideas come true, he made them himself. It’s the kind of move that seems obvious now but was pretty risky at the time. It’s not quite Silicon Valley in Wellington, New Zealand. But Jackson and his team quietly built up an engineering department that, over the course of almost 30 years, made the studio one of the most technologically advanced in the world.
It’s important to understand how the deal is set up because it’s not a simple sale. The technology assets, such as the software, pipelines, and the 275 engineers who built and maintained them, will be moved to Unity. Creators will eventually be able to access them through the cloud. The crew of about 1,700 people who do the work of making movies, the visual effects business, stays in Wellington and is now called WetaFX. Jackson is still the main owner of that business. In a way, he sold the engine but kept the car going.
Unity’s reasoning is pretty clear. The gaming company wants to grow into film production and the real-time 3D space in general. Its platform powers games like Pokémon Go and Call of Duty: Mobile. Getting Weta’s tools speeds up the process of making that world, which would have taken years to do on their own. The metaverse may be the bigger deal. That word was all the rage when this deal was announced in late 2021, right after Facebook changed its name to Meta. Unity even used that language in their official statements, but it’s still not clear how much of that is a real vision and how much is just following the crowd.
For Jackson personally, it’s hard to say enough about the financial outcome. The deal, which was a mix of cash and Unity stock, made him a billionaire in a way that movie money rarely does on its own. If you look at this from the outside, you might get the sense that Jackson has known for a long time that the building blocks of stories can be just as valuable as the stories themselves.
James Fletcher, a film critic from Sydney, said this about what Weta means to the southern hemisphere: “Peter Jackson is a visionary filmmaker.” Because he didn’t have the right tools to get what he wanted, he put together a team. That sentence, which was said in a very casual way, tells the whole story of how this deal came to be.
There is still no clear answer to the question of whether Unity can turn Weta’s very specialized tools into something that a wider range of artists can use. It’s notoriously hard to make professional VFX software more accessible to everyone without taking away what makes it powerful. But Unity is now in charge of that challenge. Jackson, on the other hand, does what he has always done: he makes movies in New Zealand with the same team and with tools that his own engineers helped create.
It’s hard not to notice that the worst thing that could happen is also one of the best deals in the history of the entertainment business around the world.
