3-D: One D Too Many

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AFTER THE SHOW
Movies, TV, Culture and Society

Number 488, Feb. 28, 2010

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ONE MOVIE DIMENSION TOO MANY

Too many 3-D films, not enough good ones,
and too few 3-D theaters to see them

By John Greenwald

Enough with 3-D already!

It doesn't matter that a minority of filmgoers have yet to see a 3-D movie. Soon it will seem that the only hot new pictures out there will be 3-D ones, and I doubt if most will be worth the extra expense to make or to see.

Hollywood has a way of ruining a good thing.

When sound first came in the late 1920s, the studios produced a number of "All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!" movies. They were Broadway revues -- a collection of musical numbers strung together with vaudeville comedy acts. Directors shot them from roughly fifth row center in a theater.

At first moviegoers found these pictures exciting, but the thrill didn't last long. They soon saw how stilted and boring they were. Movie musicals became a drug on the market.

Dance director Busby Berkeley single-handedly saved the musical by putting the camera in the middle of the chorus line and by his outrageous sets and staging. With films like "Footlight Parade" (1933), he made musicals cinematic and popular.

Hollywood had to learn similar lessons with other new technologies. Early full-color films were too garish. And watching early wide screen movies was like watching a tennis match from center court.

In the early 1950s, Hollywood tried out 3-D, a gimmick to fight what TV and the new suburban lifestyle was doing to the picture business -- killing attendance. 3-D, which never really worked (Hitchcock tried and failed with "Dial for Murder" in 1954), gave way to the three screens of Cinerama, the almost as wide Cinemascope and today's standard wide-screen and really big-screen IMAX.

In the last few years, new, vastly improved 3-D films have sprouted, thanks to hugely superior digital technology. In "Avatar" (2009), brilliant writer-director James Cameron revealed just how amazing and visionary 3-D could be.

But the studios, with their predictable excess, can easily ruin 3-D. They're seeing 3-D as more of a business than an art, and they're tripping all over themselves.

3-D has we now know it began appearing in IMAX and regular theaters in 2003 with films like Cameron's "Ghosts of the Abyss" and Robert Rodriguez's "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" (2003). Most were digitally animated cartoons, like "Monster House" (2006), or digitally enhanced live action pictures, like "The Polar Express" (2004.) Some also were released in IMAX and in conventional 2-D.

Soon enough, the studios learned that 3-D, especially IMAX 3-D, did much better at the box office. 3-D movies, though only in 15 percent of screens, took in a third or more at the box office. As theater owners converted more of their theaters to digital 3-D, even at $70,00 a shot, those percentages kept getting better. Simply put, more 3-D, more profits.

Then there's "Avatar," filling up the houses for weeks, including sold out IMAX ones: $2.4 billion in worldwide ticket sales and counting, the highest grossing film ever, according to the AP.

So the push is on to convert more theaters to 3-D, and to make more 3-D films to fill them. Even IMAX got into the act, creating mini-IMAX screens at local multiplexes. The large IMAX screen measures 76 feet high by 97 feet wide, but the mini-IMAX screen is 28 feet by 58 feet -- not only smaller but also more wide-screen and less encompassing.

By next month, there will be about 4,000 3-D screens in the U.S. and Canada. Usually, Hollywood needs twice that for a wide release. That's nowhere enough for the expected logjam of 3-D movies to be released in the next few months, says the AP.

Coming next month is Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland." In April, there's the cartoon "How to Train Your Dragon" and the live action remake "Clash of the Titans," which was hastily converted from 2-D to 3-D. That's three new 3-D films playing, plus wherever there's a demand for "Avatar" -- too many movies for too few screens. Be prepared to drive a half-hour or more to see one.

Then there's the quality issue. Cameron, who's the world's leading expert on 3-D, believes Hollywood is pushing filmmakers to make 3-D movies whether they want to or not.

Audiences are not accepting inferior 3-D, "which is good," he told MTV. "But it's typical of Hollywood getting it wrong, right? We do a film that's natively authored in 3-D, shot in 3-D, so they assume from the success of that, that they can just turn movies into 3-D in eight weeks . . . and that's going to work somehow."

Will the new 3-D version of "Clash of the Titans" work?

"It's just not the way to do it. If you want to make a movie in 3-D, make the movie in 3-D! It should be a filmmaker-driven process, not a studio-driven process," he says. "This is a whole new way to paint, a whole new set of colors," he says. But 3-D is "getting crammed down from above, and people are getting told to make movies in 3-D, and it should've been the other way around."

Audiences also are stuck. Too many 3-D movies, not enough theaters to show them, and not all worthy of being in 3-D.

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Copyright 2010 by John Greenwald. All rights reserved.. Readers can e-mail John Greenwald at johnedit@comcast.