Unreal Engine is probably the most well-known video game tool set in the world. Its fifth iteration is the system that forms the foundation of Fortnite and dozens of other games, including Black Myth: Wukong, the Oblivion remaster, and the upcoming Witcher 4. But did you know that Unreal Engine is used for more than just making video games? The technology, developed by Epic Games, has also been used to create theme park rides, television shows, and movies – and is fast becoming a regular tool for the entertainment industry.
Taking centre stage in Galaxy’s Edge, the Star Wars-themed section of Disney’s parks in Florida and California, is the Millennium Falcon. Head inside and you can ride Smuggler’s Run, a simulator experience that lets you pilot the iconic ship. It is genuinely impressive – you and your six-person crew have direct (if limited) control over the Falcon’s movements and weapons, and so as you alter the pitch and yaw of the ship, not only does the entire cockpit physically lurch around, your inputs are reflected in the flight path and enemy encounters. All this means that the world beyond the cockpit’s windows isn’t just a simple video. It’s dynamic and interactive. Simply put, the team at Walt Disney Imagineering have created a video game. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s built in Unreal Engine.
During a recent presentation as part of Unreal Fest Orlando, Disney Imagineering’s Executive VP of Creative & Interactive Experiences, Asa Kalama, explained that Smuggler’s Run is based on a “custom fork of Unreal Engine version four that supports a number of special effects that we and our partners at Industrial Light & Magic felt were really important to deliver something that feels cinematic. It feels like you’re in the movie.”
“[We did] a lot of work to develop custom shaders and custom full screen space effects like bloom,” Kalama explains. “Motion blur was something that we actually had a lot of interesting philosophical conversations around, because in real life there’s no motion blur, but a key quality of making something feel like Star Wars and feel really cinematic is the ability to have that effect on. So after a lot of testing and a lot of evaluation, we actually determined that that was something that made it feel more real, even though in fact it was actually slightly less real.”
Many of Unreal’s built-in effects were not usable by Disney’s team, as Smuggler’s Run’s five interlinked projectors needed to use a cube map rendering technique, which was incompatible with many typical Unreal features. But the resulting custom branch of Unreal Engine 4, complete with assets taken directly from Industrial Light & Magic’s library, means the ride’s digital effects both work as intended and feel authentic.
The current mission used by Smuggler’s Run opened in 2019, but a brand new one is currently in development, which is planned to launch alongside the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu in May 2026. While not linked to the events of the new movie, Mando and his little friend will still feature as part of the mission, which sees crews hunt down a high-stakes bounty.
“We’re upgrading our show game computer, so latest generation CPU graphics cards,” Kalama reveals. “And then we’re also moving from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, and we’re really excited about all the additional visual fidelity that that’s ultimately going to unlock for us.”
The mission will also feature branching pathways, allowing crews to explore either Cloud City, Corouscant, or the wreckage of the Death Star depending on the flight path they choose. “And then, even within each of the level environments themselves, we’ve worked with our partners at ILM to develop levels that have considerably more branching,” Kalama adds. “So that even if you return to the same destination, there’s a new route or new secrets to uncover.”
It seems like the idea is to further blur the line between theme park ride and video game, which in turn will enhance the immersive effect of actually commanding the Millennium Falcon. Of course, Smuggler’s Run is far from the first Star Wars project to use Unreal Engine in an unconventional way. The system has been used to create the digital backdrops used in TV shows like The Mandalorian and Ahsoka. The Third Floor, a visual effects company based in LA, has worked alongside Industrial Light & Magic to create those Star Wars shows.
“We started experimenting with game engines with various options in the 2010s,” recalls The Third Floor’s Chief Creative Officer, Joshua Wassung. “And really, just as Unreal matured in the mid 2010s, we started getting really excited about moving into that platform and really dove all in for The Mandalorian in 2019. [That’s] when we made the big shift.”
It was the flexibility of the engine that allowed us to really push that particular “moving concept art” look that we were going for.
Star Wars may be in a galaxy far, far away, but The Third Floor recently took Unreal Engine to a whole new frontier – the world of The Predator. The new movie from Prey director Dan Trachtenberg, Predator: Killer of Killers, was entirely animated using Unreal Engine 5.
“Unreal is a system that lets you do so many different things,” Wassung enthuses. “It lets you pursue your own art. So our particular approach was that we really wanted to lean into moving concept art. We wanted everything to be hand painted.” Unreal Engine was used to ingest hundreds of paintings, which were then used by a real-time compositing system to blend multiple layers together. “It was the flexibility of the engine that allowed us to really push that particular look that we were going for,” says Wassung.
One of the most impressive sequences in Predator: Killer of Killers replicates the “one-shot” style of filmmaking. In it we see a Viking woman, Ursa, fight against an array of enemies in one continuous, unbroken shot. This style is among the most complex approaches to create in live-action filmmaking, demanding extensive rehearsal, strict timing, and pin-point precision. It’s a different story when animating in Unreal, where there’s no chance of an actor flubbing their line or missing their mark. But that’s not to say there aren’t any challenges.
“There’s so many parts,” says Wassung. “I think we had 98 characters all fighting in that scene. And so we have maybe just a handful of animators. So juggling how to choreograph them is incredibly complex. But then you also have to animate the camera in a way that feels like you’re really there. It’s just so much thought goes into it, and it took months, but we love the result.”
But while creating a “one-shot”, or indeed any shot, in Unreal is far from a walk in the park, there are many tools available in the engine that help ease production woes. Ambitious projects can be made relatively quickly, which in turn can reduce budgets.
“Unreal does let you work in parallel, so that you have teams working a bit more simultaneously, which does speed up the production, and time is money,” Wassung says.
“But the other thing is the real-time feedback,” he notes. “Typically, shots in an animated feature might take an artist say one, two, even three weeks for one shot. Our quota, once the team got going, was four to five hours per shot per artist for First Pass, which is just insanely quick. So it’s really the time, the fact that you can go faster allows you to save costs overall.”
This cost saving element is unlocking new filmmaking possibilities. Rebellion Developments, the owner of Judge Dredd and the wider 2000 AD comics universe, is currently developing a new Rogue Trooper movie. Set on the violent battlefields of the far future, this comic adaptation would likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce if made using more traditional filmmaking techniques. But Rogue Trooper is not a live-action movie, nor a classically-developed CGI film. Instead, it is being made in Unreal Engine 5.
One of the key points was to make it very much not look like a video game.
“We’re significantly cheaper,” Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley told IGN in an interview last year. “We’ve done it on an indie budget. We’ve by necessity had to manage the cash flow because it’s us making this. It’s not a big studio doing it.”
Kingsley goes on to note that such savings “perhaps takes some of the shackles of limited budget off people who want to make something indie and creative. I hope it does. I hope it’s the beginning of something really exciting.”
While Rebellion is the custodian of 2000 AD, the company is best known for developing video games, such as the Sniper Elite series. And so comes the big question: without the Hollywood-grade tools used by the likes of Industrial Light & Magic and Wētā FX, will Rogue Trooper just be a feature-length video game cutscene?
“One of the key points was to make it very much not look like a video game,” Kingsley emphasises. “So we have professional movie makers working on this. We have cinematographers, we have movie lighting experts, we’ve got all the people with the qualifications to make the best possible movies.”
Among those people with qualifications is Duncan Jones, director of Moon, Source Code, and the CGI effects-heavy Warcraft movie. With Jones at the helm and a small army of professional filmmakers backing him, Rebellion has all the people required to ensure Rogue Trooper doesn’t look like it’s running on an Xbox.
Rogue Trooper’s cast, which features Aneurin Barnard, Hayley Atwell, Sean Bean, and Matt Berry among many others, is being brought to life with the aid of MetaHuman rigs, a character creation and motion-capture technology built into Unreal Engine 5. The system was not used by The Third Floor for Predator: Killer of Killers, but Wassung still sees a lot of value in it.
“So many times you’re making CG humans for whatever reason. They might be just doubles for a stunt, or they might be your lead character. You’re kind of doing the same work over and over again, at least on a base level,” he explains. “And I think that MetaHuman is this enormous shortcut because a lot of that work is now already built into this tool. So I think that that allows a young filmmaker by themselves to jump right into a character that’s already at this very high level.”
For Rebellion and its animation partners at Treehouse Digital, features like MetaHumans and the visual effects that Unreal Engine 5 is capable of have been key to bringing the strange world of Rogue Trooper to life. “What we’re not trying to do is make it look exactly the same as it would if we were filming live action,” says Kingsley. “We are taking advantage of the digital space so we can do more with volumetric fogging, for example, than you could in real life.”
While Unreal Engine may still be predominantly known for its use in video game development, it’s clear that it has quietly spread its reach throughout many other sectors of the entertainment industries. The galaxy of Star Wars is practically united by Unreal, with shows, games, and theme park rides all making use of the engine. Elsewhere, we’re seeing the tech used in many filmmaking corners, from the pre-planning of the desert sequences in Dune: Part 2, to entire movies created in the engine, such as Predator: Killer of Killers and Rogue Trooper. One thing seems certain: that list will only keep on growing as new studios and new creatives begin to experiment with Epic Games’ versatile technology.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
