The 3D Movie FAD is Already Over
Only about 3 years ago the mantra in Hollywood was that newly perfected 3D technology would change the way we watch movies forever. Early experiments in RealD 3D began first with 3D animated Polar Express and live action Journey to the Center of the Earth, but it was James Cameron’s Avatar that really brought the technology to the collective forefront. Well more than half of the theater box office for one of the most successful movies ever were spent on 3D tickets.
And then Hollywood did something amazingly stupid: They seriously jacked up the prices for 3D presentations of movies. At the same time they started using crappy technology to convert 2D movies to 3D. The double whammy caused 3D ticket sales to drop significantly. Now we have on average 2 new 3D movies a month, and the gimmick generates less than a quarter of movie tickets.
Meanwhile, 3D enabled TVs are not selling very well. Panasonic blames Hollywood’s lack of quality 3D movies, but I believe it is the huge cost of both TVs and glasses combined with the fact that 3D viewing is just not conducive to a living room viewing environment. With the new “passive” 3D TVs that allow you to watch with movie theater glasses, you have to watch sitting up, not lying on the couch. Even worse is the “without glasses” TVs which only work if you are sitting up AND directly in front of the TV. Better to go with the expensive “Active” glasses version if you ask me.
The last two weekends saw the release of the biggest budgeted 3D movies since Avatar: Transfomers: Dark of the Moon, and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Most theaters had both 2D and 3D screenings of both movies. Which did nearly 70% of theater goers see? You guessed it — the 2D versions!
I just saw HPTDH2 in 3D IMAX, and while it was cool to see the movie on a really big screen, the 3D was far from perfect. The polarized lenses on the glasses did not completely black out the other eye, which led to unwanted fuzziness, especially on whatever you were not looking directly at, and with a huge screen, I was not looking directly at a lot. The problem comes from the fact that theaters are dark, and you are wearing sunglasses. RealD 3D uses a combination of polarized lenses and yellow purple coloring to make the best separation possible, but it results in a dark screen IMAX 3D only uses polarization, but to avoid a dark screen the lenses are as light as possible, this makes the screen brighter but fuzzier as the separation between eyes is not as good.
Ironically, 3D televisions with synched flickering produce much better separation and are perfectly bright, but the glasses (at $100 to $200 a piece) are out of the price range of theaters, and most home viewers as well. The whole point of Hollywood pushing 3D in the first place was to get more people into theaters instead of watching at home, so there is not a lot of interest in catering to the home market.
In the course of making a big special effects movie in 3D, sometimes the 3D has to be manually adjusted. While watching Harry Potter in 3D, I could tell which scenes were filmed in 3D and which were worked on in post production (the big IMAX screen is extremely telling). In the latter case people looked like cardboard cutouts inflated like balloons to give them depth. Then there are the added effects to make use of 3D. In every Harry Potter movie until this one, when someone was killed they were hit by a green light and then they keeled over. In this one they exploded in 1000 pieces, because it looks good in 3D. They should have stuck with the old method just for continuity sake. The best way to see a movie is in IMAX in good old 2D. I have only seen three other films in recent years in 3D, the last was Pixar’s Up! which was two years ago. My latest experience will not get me to do so more often, in fact I plan to avoid 3D in the future unless something really special comes around.
Hollywood already has plans for 3D releases for the rest of this year and next. It is too late to stop most of them, but some are already being scrapped as the added cost is not justifiable except on big blockbusters. 3D movies do better with international markets than in the US, so until that trend ends, expect 3D movies to continue, but do not expect more and more 3D screens in your local cineplex. The projection equipment is expensive, and theater owners are not likely to buy more projectors if they can’t make their money back. 2D will continue to reign supreme for the foreseeable future.
I simply do not see the point in 3D movies/TV. It reminds me of “smellovision,” just a gimmick. Did Avatar really need to be seen in 3D in order to be enjoyed fully or was it really just another way of displaying pretty pictures? Does it make the screenplay better or the actors put in deeper, more meaningful performances? “I want you to really feel this scene, Sigourney; it’s being shot in 3D.” That’s a ridiculous idea. It can, however, distract the audience from the crappiness of a bad film, like a really killer multiplayer mode can distract from a crappy overall game like Halo: Reach. I really don’t see any potential in 3D media at all beyond making viewers duck when something blows up but, but that gets old after the third time really.
Even directly filming in 3D doesn’t create “natural” vision, there are ghosting and parallax problems especially if near and far objects are in the picture at the same time. In real life, one doesn’t really notice the double vision because the plane which you are consciously looking at has the correct depth. But in a movie, that plane is fixed at the time of filming.
This problem alone tells me that 3D is a gimmick, because it cannot be done right with current technology.