Why no AK-74s in western film armories?

[MT2008]

Originally Posted by Chitoryu12

Not to mention that with CGI improving and the pool of talented (enough) special effects wizards and animators increasing, you can often just give your actors cheap airsoft guns and use digital firing effects.

The movie armorers active on IMFDB would beg to differ on that, I am sure. They would be out of a job if it were true.

In all seriousness, while airsoft guns have obviously become very popular for non-firing scenes (as can be seen on countless IMFDB pages), I doubt that they will ever replace real guns in firing scenes. It still costs far more to hire a digital effects team - especially on a production that has no other digital visual effects - than to hire a single armorer to supervise the use of blank-adapted real weapons on the set. Even with all of the legal restrictions that apply nowadays, gunfire with real weapons and blanks is still one of the cheapest effects that filmmakers can add to their movies or TV shows.