But is the return of 3-D a revolution or just a fad?
By Daniel Neman
First came sound. Then came color.
Is 3-D the next revolution, changing forever the way we watch movies?
Jeffrey Katzenberg thinks so, and so do a lot of other people. Katzenberg, head of DreamWorks Animation and formerly the driving force behind Disney, is one of the major figures influencing the way movies have been made over the last 20 years.
He and a lot of very important people in Hollywood are risking enormous sums of money on the assumption that the 3-D process is here to stay. More than 35 movies are scheduled to be released in 3-D before the end of next year.
The risk is large, but the potential rewards are even bigger — in part because theaters are charging more for 3-D than regular films.
The 3-D extravaganza Avatar, of course, is the super-humongo-biggest movie of all time (unless you factor in inflation — then it’s still Gone With the Wind by far). And the massive success of the recent Alice in Wonderland must also be due in part to its use of 3-D. (It was converted from conventional 2-D after it was shot, a relatively inexpensive process.)
So 3-D is hot right now. But will it stay that way forever, like sound and color?
It has been tried before, beginning all the way back in the 1920s. In the ’50s, 3-D movies came to the fore as Hollywood tried to use them to fend off the threat from television. But the films that were shot in the process then tended to be a little stupid. Bwana Devil is remembered now only for being the first 3-D movie in color, and even The Three Stooges made a couple of uninspiring 3-D shorts.
After just a year or two, audiences tired of the gimmick. Alfred Hitchcock originally shot Dial M for Murder in 3-D, but it was released in the flat version because of lack of interest.
The process more or less disappeared until the 1980s, when it was revived for a number of horror films (Friday the 13th: Part III and Jaws 3-D) that had the distinction of being possibly even worse than the 3-D films shot in the ’50s. When it died again, it was unmourned.
In its previous incarnations, 3-D was killed by two culprits: The technology, requiring cardboard glasses with separate blue and red cellophane panels, did not work well and gave many viewers headaches. And no one could think of how to make it more than a mere stunt, usually simulating projectiles coming at the audience.
Is it any wonder that the most profitable 3-D movie of all time, costing just $100,000 to make and grossing more than $25 million, was the 1969 soft-core porn flick The Stewardesses? The unsubtle tag line was “See the lusty stewardesses leap from the screen onto your lap.”
But the technology is much improved now. With the advent of digital cameras and digital projectors, 3-D is less cumbersome to film and to screen. It looks better, and headaches have been eliminated. And the plastic glasses with gray polarizing lenses are somewhat less dorky than the old cardboard blue-and-red ones.
Still unknown is whether today’s filmmakers will find anything to do with the technology or whether 3-D movies will go the way of Dial M for Murder. The vast majority of all the 3-D pictures scheduled to come out in the next 18 months are horror films, animated films or visual extravaganzas such as the Harry Potter movies and Green Lantern. If 3-D truly is the wave of the future, comparable to sound and color, then every sort of movie would be using it, from dramas to comedies. For the time being, filmmakers seem to be shooting those genres in a conventional format.
It cannot be disputed that the astonishing success of Avatar is attributable solely to the glorious wonders of its 3-D — no one left the theater impressed by the story or the script. But will audiences stream to other 3-D movies in similar numbers, or did Avatar do so well because it was a novelty?
If 3-D is to become a permanent part of filmmaking, filmmakers are going to have to figure out what to do with it. As Avatar has shown, the rewards of using it can be enormous. But the cost can also be prohibitive. Katzenberg estimates that shooting in 3-D adds 15 percent to a movie’s budget.
If a few 3-D movies start to flop, and if they waste millions of extra dollars because they were filmed in the new process, we’ll see how committed Hollywood is to that third dimension.
Dan Neman is a former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. His weekly movie reviews appear at www.TheBoomerMagazine.com.
If 3-D is to become a permanent part of filmmaking, filmmakers are going to have to figure out what to do with it. As Avatar has shown, the rewards of using it can be enormous. But the cost can also be prohibitive. Katzenberg estimates that shooting in 3-D adds 15 percent to a movie’s budget.
